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ToL I, Zl«. ML O 0 L f7. IML ABSiiAi IvlMoriptlon, 

FATAL 

BOOTS 

W. M. THACKERAY. 


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IJypatia,by C has, Kingsley, P’tl 
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Silas Marner, by- Geo<: ,iiot. . 

Q’he Queen of the .Coiiaty . , 

Life of Cromwell, by Hood.. 
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Child’s History of England 

Molly Bawn, by The Duchess.. 
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Romola, by Geo. Eliot, Pa* 1 1. . 
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Science in Short Chapters 

Zanoni,by Lord Lytton 

A Daughter of Heth 

The Right and Wrong Uses of 
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Night and,- Morning, Pt. I 

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Heart and Sciehce, by Co Jins. . 
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The Dean’s Daughter 




15 

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.15 

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^0 

.15 

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20 

.35 

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.rj 

.20 

.20 

.15 

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.20 

.20 

.20 

20 

.20 

20 

20 


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Labor and Capital 20 

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THE FATAL BOOTS 


AND OTHER SKETCHES. 


BY 

WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY. 


NEW YORK: 

JOHN W. LOVELL COMPANY, 

14 AND 16 Vesey Street. 




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THE FATAL BOOTS. 


JANUARY.— THE BIRTH OF THE YEAR. 

Some poet has observed, that if any man would write down 
what has really happened to him in this mortal life, he would 
be sure to make a good book, though he never had met with a 
single adventure from his birth to his burial. How much more, 
then, must I, who have had adventures, most singular, pathetic, 
and unparalleled, be able to compile an instructive and enter^ 
taining volume for the use of the public. 

I don’t mean to say that I have killed lions, or seen the 
wonders of travel in the deserts of Arabia or Prussia ; or that 
1 have been a very fashionable character, living with dukes and 
peeresses, and writing my recollections of them, as the way 
now is^. I never left this my native isle, nor spoke to a lord 
(except an Irish one, who had rooms in our house, and forgot 
to pay three weeks’ lodging and extras) ; but, as our immortal 
bard observes, I have in the course of my existence been so 
eaten up by the slugs and harrows of outrageous fortune, and 
have been the object of such continual and extraordinary ill- 
luck, that I believe it would melt the heart of a milestone to 
read of it — that is, if a milestone had a heart of anything but 
stone. 

Twelve of my adventures, suitable for meditation and per- 
usal during the twelve months of the year, have been arranged 
by me for this work. They contain a part of the history of a 
great, and, confidently I may say, a good man. I was not a 
spendthrift like other men. I never wronged any man of a 
shilling, though I am as sharp a fellow at a bargain as any in 
Eurooe. I never injured a fellow-creature ; on the contrary. 


3 ^ 


STOK/ES. 


oil several occasions, when injured myself, have shown the 
most wonderful forbearance. 1 come of a tolerably good 
family ; and yet, born to wealth — of an inoffensive disposition, 
careful of the money that I had, and eager to get more, — I 
have been going down hill ever since my journey of life began, 
and have been pursued by a complication of misfortunes such 
as surely never happened to any man but the unhappy Bob 
Stubbs. 

Bob Stubbs is my name ; and I haven’t got a shilling : I 
have borne the commission of lieutenant in the service of King 
George, and am ?iow — but never mind what I am now, for the 
public will know in a few pages more. My father was of the 
Suffolk Stubbses — a well-to-do gentleman of Bungay. My 
grandfather had been a respected attorney in that town, and 
left my papa a pretty little fortune. I was thus the inheritor of 
competence, and ought to be at this moment a gentleman. 

My misfortunes may be said to have commenced about a 
year before my birth, when my papa, a young fellow pretending 
to study the law in London, fell madly in love with Miss Smith, 
the daughter of a tradesman, who did not give her a sixpence, 
and afterwards became bankrupt. My papa married this Miss 
Smith, and carried her off to the country, where I was born, in 
an evil hour for me. 

Were 1 to attempt to describe my early years, you would 
laugh at me as an impostor ; but the following letter from 
mamma to a friend, after her marriage, will pretty well' show 
you wliat a poor foolish creature she was ; and what a reckless 
extravagant fellow was my other unfortunate parent : — 

“to miss ELIZA KICKS, IN GRACECHURCH STREET, LONDON. 

“ Oh, Lliza ! your Susan is the happiest girl under heaven ! 
My Thomas is an angel ! not a tall grenadier-like looking 
fellow, such as I always vowed I would marry : — on the con- 
trary, he is what the world would call dumpy, and I hesitate 
not to confess, that his eyes have a cast in them. But what 
then ? when one of his e 3 'es is fixed on me, and one on my 
babe, they are lighted up with an affection which my pen can- 
not describe, and which, certainly, was never bestowed upon 
any woman so strongly as upon your happy Susan Stubbs. 

“When he comes home from shooting, or the farm, if you 
could see dear Thomas with me and our dear little Bob ! as I 
sit on one knee, and baby on the other, and he dances us both 
about. I often wish that we had Sir Joshua, or some great 


THE FATAL IS DOTS. 


737 

painter, to depict the group ; for sure it is the prettiest picture 
in the whole world, to see three such loving merry people. 

“ Dear baby is the most lovely little creature that can possi- 
bly bCy — the very vnage of papa ; he is cutting his teeth, and the 
delight of everybody. Nurse says that when he is older, he will 
get rid of his squint and his hair will get great deal\^s's> red. 
IDoctor Bates is as kind, and skilful, and attentive as we could 
desire. Think what a blessing to have had him ! Ever since 
poor baby’s birth, it has never had a day of quiet ; and he has 
been obliged to give it from three to four doses every week ; — 
how thankful ought we to be that the dear thing is as well as it 
is ! It got through the measles wonderfully ; then it had a 
little rash ; and then a nasty hooping-cough ; and then a fever, 
and continual pains in its poor little stomach, crying, poor dear 
child, from morning till night. 

‘‘ But dear Tom is an excellent nurse ; and many and many 
a night has he had no sleep, dear man ! in consequence of the 
poor little baby. Ele walks up and down with it for Iioiu's, 
singing a kind of song (dear fellow, he has no more voice than 
a tea-kettle), and bobbing his head backwards and forwards, 
and looking in his nightcap and dressing-gown, so droll. Oh, 
Eliza ! how you would laugh to see him. 

“ We have one of the best nursemaids in the world., — an 
Irishwoman, who is as fond of baby almost as his mother (but 
that can never be). She takes it to walk in the park for hours 
together, and I really don’t know why Thomas dislikes her. 
EJe says she is tipsy, very often, and slovenly, which I cannot 
conceive to be sure the nurse is sadly dirty, and sometimes 
smells very strong of gin. 

“ But what of that ? — these little drawbacks onl}’ make 
home more pleasant. When one thinks how many mothers 
have no nursemaids : how many poor dear children have no 
doctors : ought we not to be thankful for Mary Malowney, and 
that Dr. Bates’s bill is forty-seven pounds ? EIow^ ill must dear 
baby have been, to require so much physic ! 

“ But they are a sad expense, these dear babies, after all. 
Fancy, Eliza, how much this Mary Malowney costs us. Ten 
shillings every week ; a glass of brandy or gin at dinner ; three 
pint-bottles of Mr. Thrale’s best porter every day, — making 
twenty-one in a week, and nine hundred and ninety in the 
eleven months she has been with us. Then, for baby, there is 
Dr. Bates’s bill of forty-five guineas, two guineas for christen- 
ing, twenty for a grand christening supper and ball (rich uncle 
John mortally offended because he was made godfather, and 


STORIES, 


738 

had to give baby a silver cup : he has struck Thomas out ot 
his will : and old Mr. Firkin quite as much hurt because he 
was 7 wt asked : he will not speak to me or Thomas in conse- 
quence) ; twenty guineas for flannels, laces, little gowns, caps, 
napkins, and such baby’s ware : and all this out of 300/. a 
year ! But Thomas expects to make a great deal by his farm. 

“ We have got the most charming country-house you can 
imagine : it is quite shut in by trees, and so retired that, though 
only thirty miles from London, the post comes to us but once a 
week. The roads, it must be confessed, are execrable ; it is 
winter now, and we are up to our knees in mud and snow. 
But oh, Eliza ! how happy we are : with Thomas (he has had a 
sad attack of rheumatism, dear man !) and little Bobby, and our 
kind friend Dr. Bates, who comes so far to see us, I leave you 
to fancy that we have a charming merry party, and do not care 
for all the gayeties of Ranelagh. 

“ Adieu ! dear baby is crying for his mamma. A thousand 
kisses from your affectionate 

“ Susan Stubbs.” 

There it is ! Doctor’s bills, gentleman-farming, twenty-one 
pints of porter a week. In this way my unnatural parents were 
already robbing me of my property. 


FEBRUARY.— CUTTING WP:ATHEII. 

T HAVE called this chapter ‘‘ cutting weather,” partly in com- 
pliment to the month of February, and partly in respect of my 
own misfortunes, which you are going to read about. For I 
have often thought that January (which is mostly twelfth-cake 
and holiday dme) is like the first four or five years of a little 
boy’s life ; then comes dismal February, and the working-days 
with it, when chaps begin to look out for themselves, after the 
Christmas and the New Year’s heyday and merry-making arc 
over, which our infancy may well be said to be. Well can I 
recollect that bitter first of February, when I first launched out 
out into the world and appeared at Doctor Swishtaiks academy, 

I began at school that life of prudence and economy which 
I have carried on ever since. My mother gave me eighteen- 
pence on setting out (poor soul ! I thought her heart would break 
as she kissed me, and bade God bless me) ; and, besides, I 
had a small capital of my own^ which I had amassed for a year 


THE FATAL BOOL'S. 


739 


previous. I’ll tell you what I used to do. Wherever I saw six 
halfpence I took one. If it was asked for, I said I had taken 
it, and' gave it back ; — if it was not missed, I said nothing 
about it, as why should I 'i — those who don’t miss their money 
don’t lose their money. So I^had a little private fortune of 
three shillings, besides mother’s eighteenpence. At school 
they called me the copper merchant, 1 had such lots of it. 

Now, even at a preparatory school, a well-regulated boy may 
better himself : and I can tell you I did. 1 never was in 
any quarrels : 1 never was very high in the class or very low ; 
but there was no chap so much respected : — and why .? 1 \l 

ahvays money. The other boys spent all theirs in the first 
day or two, and they gave me plenty of cakes and barley-sugar 
then, I can tell you. I’d no need to spend my own money, for 
they would insist upon treating me. Well, in a week, when 
theirs was gone, and they had but their threepence a week to 
look to for the rest of the half-year, what did I do ? Why, I ' 
am proud to say that three-halfpence out of the three-pence a 
week of almost all the young gentlemen at Dr. Swishtail’s came 
into my pocket. Suppose for instance, Tom Hicks wanted a 
slice of gingerbread, who had the money ? Little Bob Stubbs, 
to be sure. “ Hicks,” I used to say, ‘‘ Pll buy you three half- 
p’orth of gingerbread, if you’ll give me threepence next Satur- 
day.” And he agreed ; and next Saturday came, and he very 
often could not pay me more than three-halfpence. Then there 
was the threepence I was to have ihe next Saturday. I’ll tell 
you what I did for a whole half-year : — I lent a chap by the 
name of Dick Bunting, three-halfpence the first Saturday for 
threepence the next : he could not pay me more than half 
when Saturday came, and I’m blest if I did not make him pay 
me three-halfpence for three-and-twenty weeks running., making 
two shillings and tenpence-halfpenny. But he was a sad dis- 
honorable fellow, Dick Bunting ; for after I’d been so kind to 
him, and let him off for three-and-twenty-weeks the money he 
owed me, holidays came, and threepence he owed me still. 
Well, according to the common principles of practice, after six 
weeks’ holidays, he ought to have paid me exactly sixteen 
shillings, which was my due. For the 


First week the zd. would be (id j Fourth week 4 ^. 

Second week ij. Fifth week • • 

Third week 2 J. 1 Sixth week i6j. 


Nothing could be more just ; and yet — will it be believed ? — 
v h.en Bunting came back he offered me three-haJfpencc I the 
mean, dishonest scoundrel. 


740 


STORIES, 


However, I was even with him, I can tell 3'Ou. — He spent 
all hi.i money in a fortnight, and the?i I screwed him down ! I 
made him, besides giving me a penny for a penny, pay me a 
quarter of his bread-and-butter at breakfast and a quarter of 
his cheese at supper ; and before the half-year was out, I got 
from him a silver fruit-knife, a box of compasses, and a very 
pretty silver-laced waiscoat, in which I went home as proud as 
a king : and what's more, I had no less than three golden guineas 
in the pocket of it, besides fifteen shillings, the knife, and a 
brass bottle-screw, which I got from another chap. It wasn’t 
bad interest for twelve shillings — which was all the money Td 
had in the year — was it ? Heigho ! I’ve often wished that I 
could get such a chance again in this wicked world ; but men 
are more avaricious now than they used to be in those dear early 
days. 

Well, I went home in my new waistcoat as fine as a peacock ; 
and when I gave the bottle-screw to my father, begging him to 
take it as a token of my affection for him, my dear mother 
burst into such a fit of tears as I never saw, and kissed and 
hugged me fit to smother me. ‘‘ Bless him, bless him,” says 
she, “ to think of his old father. And where did you purchase 
it, Bob ? ” — ‘‘ Why, mother,” says I, “ I purchased it out of my 
savings ” (which was as true as the gospel). — When I said this, 
mother looked round to father, smiling, although she had tears 
in her eyes, and she took his hand, and with her other hand 
drew me to her. “ Is he not a noble boy } ” says she to my 
father: and only nine years old “ Faith,” says my father, 

he is a good lad, Susan. Thank thee, my boy : and here is a 
c.^own-piece in return for thy bottle-screw : — it shall open us a 
boitle of the very best too,” says my father; And he kept his 
word. I always was fond of good wine (though never, frQjn a 
motive of proper self-denial, having any in my cellar) ; and, by 
Jupiter! on this night I had my little skinful, — for there was 
no stinting, — so pleased were my dear parents with the bottle- 
screw. The best of it was, it only cost me threepence originally 
which a chap could not pay me. 

Seeing this game was such a good one, I became very 
generous towards my parents ; and a capital way it is to 
encourage liberality in children. I gave mamma a very neat 
brass thimble, and she gave me a half-guinea piece. Then I 
gave her a very’ pretty needle-book, which I made myself with an 
lice of spades from a new pack of caids we had, and I got Sally, 
our maid, to cover it with a bit of pink satin her mistress had 
given her ; and 1 made the leaves of the book, which I van- 


rilK FAJ'AL BOOTS^ 


741 

dyked very nicely, out of a piece of flannel I had had round my 
neck for a sore throat. It smelt a little of hartshorn, but it was 
a beautiful needle-book ; and mamma was so delighted with it, 
that she went into town and bought me a gold-laced hat. 
4'hen I bought papa a pretty china tobacco-stopper : but I am 
sorry to say of my dear father that he was not so generous as 
my mamma or myself, for he only burst out laughing, and did 
not give me so much as a half-crown piece, which was the least 
I expected from him. “ I sha’n’t give you anything. Bob, this 
time,” says he ; ‘‘ and I wish, my boy, you would not make any 
more such presents, — for, really, they are too expensive.” Ex- 
pensive indeed ! I hate meanness, — even in a father. 

I must tell you about the silver-edged waistcoat which 
Bunting gave me. Mamma asked me about it, and I told her 
the truth, — that it was a present from one of the boys for my 
kindness to him. Well, what does she do but writes back to 
Dr. Swishtail, when I went to school, thanking him for his 
attention to her dear son, and sending a shilling to the good 
and grateful little boy who had given me the waistcoat ! 

“ What waistcoat is it,” says the Doctor to me, ‘‘ and who 
gave it to you 1 

‘‘ Bunting gave it me, sir,” says I. 

Call Bunting ! ” And up the little ungrateful chap came. 
Would you believe it, he burst into tears, — told that the waist- 
coat had been given him by his mother, and that he had been 
forced to give it for a debt to Copper Merchant, as the nasty 
little blackguard called me He then said how, for three- 
halfpence, he had been compelled to pay me three shillings 
(the sneak ! as if he had been obliged to borrow the three-half- 
pence !) — how all the other boys had been swindled (swindled !) 
by me in like manner, — and how, with only twelve shillings, 1 
had managed to scrape together four guineas. ^ ^ ^ ^ 

My courage almost fails me as I describe the shameful scene 
that followed. The boys were called in, my little account-book 
was dragged out of my cupboard, to prove how much I had 
received from each, and every farthing of my money was paid 
back to them. The tyrant took the thirty shillings that my dear 
parents had given me, and said he should put them into the 
poor-box at church ; and, after having made a long discourse 
to the boys about meanness and usury, he said, “ Take off your 
coat, Mr. Stubbs, and restore Bunting his waistcoat.” I did, 
and stood without coat and waistcoat in the midst of the nast}' 
grinning boys. I was going to put on my coat, — 

‘‘ Stop! ” says he. ‘‘ Take down his Breeches ! ” 


!742 


STOR/ES. 


Ruthless, brutal villain ! Sam Hopkins, the biggest boy, 
took them down — horsed me — and I was flogged, sh‘ : ^^es 
flogged ! O revenge ! I, Robert Stubbs, who had done noth* 
ing but what was right, was brutally flogged at ten years of age 1 
— Though February was the shortest month, I remembered it 
long. 


MARCH.— SHOWERY. 

When my mamma heard of the treatment of her darling 
she was for bringing an action against the schoolmaster, or else 
for tearing his eyes out (when, dear soul ! she \\x)uld not have 
torn the eyes out of a flea, had it been her own injury), and, at 
the very least, for having me removed from the school where I 
had been so shamefully treated. But papa was stern for once, 
and vowed that I had been served quite right, declared that I 
should not be removed from the school, and sent old Swishtail 
a brace of pheasants for what he called his kindness to me. 
Of these the old gentleman invited me to partake, and made 
a very (jueer speech at dinner, as he was cutting them up, about 
the excellence of my parents, and his owm determination to be 
kinder still to me, if ever I ventured on such practices again. 
So I was obliged to give up my old trade of lending : for the 
Doctor declared that any boy who borrowed should be flogged, 
and any one who paid should be flogged twice as much. There 
was no standing against such a prohibition as this, and my little 
commerce was ruined. 

I was not very high in the school : not having been able to 
get farther than that dreadful Propr'ia qucB maribuo in the Latin 
grammar, of which, though I have it by heart even now, I never 
could understand a syllabic : but, on account of my size, my 
age, and the prayers of my mother, was allowed to have the 
privilege of the bigger boys, and on holidays to walk about in 
the town. Great dandies we were, too, when we thus went out. 
I recollect my costume very well : a thunder -and-lightning coat, 
a white waistcoat embroidered neatly at the pockets, a lace frill, 
a pair of knee breeches, and elegant white cotton or silk stock- 
ings. This did very well, but still I was dissatisfled : I wanted 
a pair of boots. Three boys in the school had boots — I was 
mad to have them too. 

But my papa, when I wrote to him, would not hear of it ; 
and three pounds, the price of a pair, v;as too large a sum for 


THE FATAL BOOTS, 


743 


my mother to take from the housekeeping, or for me to pay, 
in the present impoverished state of my exchequer ; but the 
desire for the boots was so strong, that have them I must at 
any rate. 

There was a German bootmaker who had just set up in oiir 
town in those days, who afterwards made his fortune in London. 
I determined to have the boots from him, and did not despair, 
before the end of a year or two, either to leave the school, when 
I should not mind his dunning me, or to screw the money from 
mamma, and so pay him. 

So I called upon this man — Stiffelkind was his name — and 
he took my measure for a pair. 

‘‘You are a vary yong gentleman to wear dop-boots,’^ said 
the shoemaker. 

“I suppose, fellow,” says I, “that is my business and not 
yours. Either make the boots or not — but when you speak to 
a man of my rank, speak respectfully !” And I poured out a 
number of oaths, in order to impress him with a notion or my 
respectability. 

They had the desired effect. “ Stay, sir,” says he. “ I 
have a nice litt^l pair of dop-boots dat 1 tink will jost do for 
you.” And he produced, sure enough, the most elegant things 
I ever saw. “ Day were made,” said he, “ for de Honorable 
Mr. Stiffney, of de Cards, but were too small.” 

“ Ah, indeed 1 ” said I. “ Stiffney is a relation of mine. 
And what, you scoundrel, will you have the impudence to ask 
for these things ? ” He replied, “ Three pounds.” 

“ Well,” said I, “ they are confoundedly dear ; but, as you 
will have a long time to wait for your money, why, I shall have 
my revenge you see.” The man looked alarmed, and began a 

speech ; “ Sare, — I cannot let dem go vidout ” but a bright 

thought struck me, and I interrupted — “ Sir I donff sir me. 
Take off the boots, fellow, and, hark ye, when you speak to a 
nobleman, don’t say — Sir.” 

“A hundert tousand pardons, my lort,” says he : “if I had 
known you were a lort, I vood never have called you — Sir. 
Vat name shall I put down in my books ? ” 

“ Name } — ah I why. Lord Cornwallis, to be sure,” said I, 
as I walked off in the boots. 

“ And vat shall I do vid my lort’s shoes ? ” 

“ Keep them until I send for them,” said I. And, giving 
him a patronizing bow, I walked out of the shop, as the Ger- 
man tied up ray rhocs in rsne:*. 


744 


STOKiES. 


This Story I would not have told, but that my whole life 
turned upon these accursed boots. I walked back to school as 
proud as a peacock, and easily succeeded in satisfying the 
boys as to the manner in which I came by my new ornaments. 

Well, one fatal Monday morning — the blackest of all black- 
Mondays that ever I knew — as we were all of us playing be- 
tween school-hours, I saw a posse of boys round a stranger, 
who seemed to be looking out for one of us. A sudden trem- 
bling seized me— I knew it was StiJffelkind. What had brought 
him here ? He talked loud, and seemed angry. So I rushed 
into the school-room, and burying my head between my hands, 
began reading for dear life. 

“ I vant Lort Cornvallis, ” said the horrid bootmaker. 
“ His lortship belongs, I know, to dis honorable school, for I 
saw him vid de boys at chorch yesterday.’’ 

“ Lord who ? ” 

“ Vy, Lort Cornvallis to be sure — a very fat yong nobleman, 
vid red hair : he squints a little, and svears dreadfully.” 

“ There’s no Lord Cornvallis here,” said one ; and there 
was a pause. 

“ Stop ! I have it,” says that odious Bunting. “ It must be 
Stubbs ! ” And “ Stubbs ! Stubbs ! ” every one cried out, while 
I was so busy at my book as not to hear a word. 

At least, two of the biggest chaps rushed into the school- 
room, and seizing each an arm, run me into the playground — 
bolt up against the shoemaker. 

“ Dis is my man. I beg your lortship’s pardon,” says he, 
I have brought your lortship’s shoes, vich you left. See, dey 
have been in dis parcel ever since you vent away in my boots.” 

“ Shoes, fellow ! ” says.I. “ 1 never saw your face before!” 
For I knew there was nothing for it but brazening it out. 
“Upon the honor of a gentleman I ” said I, turning round to 
the boys. They hesitated ; and if the trick had turned in my 
favor, fifty of them would have seized hold of Stiffelkind and 
drubbed him soundly. 

“ Stop ! ” says Bunting (hang him I). “ Let’s see the shoes. 

If they fit him, why then the cobbler’s right.” They did fit 
me ; and not only that, but the name of Stubbs was written in 
them at full length. 

“Vat! ” said Stiffelkind. “ Is he not a lort So help me 
Himmel, I never did vonce tink of looking at de shoes, which 
have been lying ever since in dis piece of brown paper.” And 
then, gathering anger as he went on, he thundered out so much 
of his abuse of me, in his C-erman-English, that the boys roared 


7VM' FATAL BOOl^S. 

with laughter. , Swishtail came in in the midst of the disturb- 
ance, and asked what the noise meant. 

“ It’s only Lord Cornwallis, sir,” said the boys, “ battling 
with his shoemaker about the price of a pair of top-boots.” 

‘‘ Oh, sir,” said I, it was only in fun that I called myself 
Lord Cornwallis.” 

‘‘In fun ! — Where are the boots ? And you, sir, give me 
your bill.” My beautiful boots were brought ; and Stiffelkind 
produced his bill. “ Lord Cornwallis to Samuel Stiffelkind, 
for a pair of boots — four guineas.” 

“You have been fool enough, sir,” says the Doctor, looking 
very stern, “ to let this boy impose on you as a lord ; and 
knave enough to charge him double the value of the article you 
sold him. Take back the boots, sir ! I won’t pay a penny of 
ycur bill ; nor can you get a penny. As for you, sir, you miser- 
able swindler and cheat, I shall not flog you as I did before, 
but I shall send you home : you are not fit to be the companion 
of honest boys.” 

“ Suppose we duck hh?i before he goes } ” piped out a very 
small voice. The Doctor grinned significantly, and left the 
school-room ; and the boys knew by this they might have their 
will. They seized me and carried me to the playground pump : 
they pumped upon me until I was half dead ; and the monster, 
Stiffelkind, stood looking on for the half-hour the operation 
lasted. 

I suppose the Doctor, at last, thought I had had pumping 
enough, for he rang the school-bell, and the boys were obliged 
to leave me. As I got out of the trough, Stiffelkind was alone 
with me. “ Veil, my lort,” says he, “ you paid somethiug for 
dese boots, but not all. By Jubider, you shall fiever hear de end 
of de7nP And I didn’t. 


APRIL—FOOLING 

After this, as you may fancy, I left this disgusting estab- 
lishment, and lived for some time along with pa and mamma at 
home. My education was finished, at least mamma and I 
agreed that it was ; and from boyhood until hobbadyhoyhood 
(which I take to be about the sixteenth year of the life of a 
young man, and may be likened to the month of April when 


^46 STORIES, \( 

spring begins to bloom) — from fourteen until seventeen, I say, 

I remained at home, doing nothing — for which I have ever 
since had a great taste — the idol of my mamma, who took part 
in all my quarrels with father, and used regularly to rob the 
weekly expenses in order to find me in pocket-money. Poor 
soul ! many and many is the guinea I have had from her in that 
way ; and so she enabled me to cut a very pretty figure. 

Papa was for having me at this time articled to a merchant, 
or put to some profession ; but mamma and I agreed that I was 
born to be a gentleman and not a tradesman, and the army was 
the only place for me. Everybody was a soldier in those times, 
for the French war had just began, and the whole country was 
swarming with militia regiments. “ We’ll get him a commission 
in a marching regiment,” said my father. ‘‘ As we have no 
money to purchase him up, he’ll fight his way, I make no 
doubt.” And papa looked at me with a kind of air of contempt, 
as much as to say he doubted whether I should be very eager 
for such a dangerous way of bettering myself. 

I wish you could have heard mamma’s screech when he 
talked so coolly of my going out to fight ! “ What ! send him 

abroad, across the horrid, horrid sea — to be wretched and per- 
haps drowned, and only to land for the purpose of fighting the 
wicked Frenchmen, — to be wounded, and perhaps kick — kick — 
killed ! Oh, Thomas, Thomas ! would you murder me and your 
boy ? ” There was a regular scene. However, it ended — as 
it always did — in mother’s getting the better, and it was settled 
that I should go into the militia. And why not ^ The uniform 
is just as handsome, and the danger not half so great. I don’t 
think in the course of my whole military experience I ever 
fought anything, except an old woman, who had the impudence 
to hallo out, “ Heads up, lobster ! ” — Well, I joined the North 
Bungays, and was fairly launched into the world. 

I was not a handsome man, I know ; but there was some- 
things about me — that’s very evident — for the girls always 
laughed when they talked to me, and the men, though they 
affected to call me a poor little creature, squint-eyes, knock- 
knees, red-head, and so on, were evidently annoyed by my suc- 
cess, for they hated me so confoundedly. Even at the present 
time they go on, though I have given up gallivanting, as I call 
it. But in the April of my existence, — that is, in anno Domini 
1791, or so — it was a different case ; and having nothing else 
to do, and being bent upon bettering my condition, I did some 
very pretty things in that way. But I was not hot-headed and 
impudent, like most young fellows. Don’t fancy I looked for 


THE^ATAL BOOTS. 


747 


beauty! Pish! — I wasn’t such a fool. Nor for temper; I 
don’t care about a bad temper : I could break any woman’s 
heart in two years. What I wanted was to get on in the world. 
Of course I didn’t prefer 7 m ugly woman, or a shrew ; and when 
the choice offered, would certainly put up with a handsome, 
good-humored girl, with plenty of money, as any honest man 
would. 

Now there were two tolerably rich girls in our parts : Miss 
Magdalen Crutty, with twelve thousand pounds (and, to do her 
justice, as plain a girl as ever I saw), and Miss Mary Waters, a 
fine, tall, plump, smiling, peach-cheeked, golden-haired, white- 
skinned lass, with only ten. Mary Waters lived with her uncle, 
the Doctor, who had helped me into the world, and who was 
trusted with this little orphan charge very soon after. My 
mother, as you have heard, was so fond of Bates, and Bates so 
fond of little Mary, that both, at first, were almost always in our 
house ; and I used to call her my little wife as soon as I could 
speak, and before she could walk almost. It was beautiful to 
see us, the neighbors said. 

Well, when her brother, the lieutenant of an India ship, 
came to be captain, and actually gave Mary five thousand 
pounds, when she was about ten years old, and promised her 
five thousand more, there was a great talking, and bobbing, and 
smiling between the Doctor and my parents, and Mary and I 
were left together more than ever, and she was told to call me 
her little husband. And she did ; and it was considered a 
settled thing from that day. She was really amazingly fond of 
me. 

Can any one call me mercenary after that ? Though Miss 
Crutty had twelve thousand, and Mary only ten (five in hand, 
and five ip the bush), I stuck faithfully to Mary. As a matter 
of course, Miss Crutty hated Miss Waters. The fact v/as, Mary 
had all the country dangling after her, and not a soul would 
come to Magdalen, for all her 12,000/. I used to be attentive 
to her though (as it’s always useful to be) ; and Mary would 
sometimes laugh and sometimes cry at my flirting with Mag- 
dalen. This I thought proper very quickly to check. “ Mary,’^ 
said I, you know that my love for you is disinterested, — for 
I am faithful to you, though Miss Crutty is richer than you. 
Don’t fly into a rage, then, because I pay her attentions, 
when you know that my heart and my promise are engaged to 
you.” 

“ The fact is, to tell a little bit of a secret, there is nothing 
like the having two strings to your bow, ‘*Who knows?’' 

4i> 


STORIKS. 


748 

thought I. ‘‘ Mary may die ; and then where are my 10,000/.? 
So 1 used to be very kind indeed to Miss Crutty ; and well it 
was that I was so : for when I was twenty and Mary eighteen, 
I’m blest if news did not arrive that Captain Watens, who was 
coming home to England with all his money in rupees, had been 
taken — ship, rupees, self and all — by a French privateer ; and 
Mary, instead of 10,000/., had only 5,000/., making a difference 
of no less than 350/. per annum betwixt her and Miss Crutty. 

I had just joined my regiment (the famous North Bungay 
Fencibles, Colonel Craw commanding) when this news reached 
me ; and you may fancy how a young man, in an expensive 
regiment and mess, having uniforms and what not to pay for, 
and a figure to cut in the world, felt at hearing such news ! 
“My dearest Robert,” wrote Miss Waters, “wall deplore my 
dear brother’s loss : but not, I am sure, the money which that 
kind and generous soul had promised me. I have still five 
thousand pounds, and with this and your own little fortune (I 
had 1,000/ in the Five per Cents. !) w^e shall be as happy and 
contented as possible.” 

Happy and contented indeed ! Didn’t I know how my 
father got on with his 300/ a year, and how it was all he could 
do out of it to add a hundred a year to my narrow^ income, and 
live himself ! My mind was made up. I instantly mounted 
the coach and flew to our village, — to Mr. Crutty’s, of course. 
It w^as next door to Doctor Bates’s ; but I had no business 
there, 

I found Magdalen in the garden. “ Heavens, Mr. Stubbs ! ” 
said she, as in my new uniform I appeared before her, “ 1 
really did never — such a handsome officer — expect to see you.” 
And she made as if she would blush, and began to tremble 
violently. I led her to a garden-seat. I seized her hand — it 
was not withdrawn. I pressed it ; — I thought the pressure was 
returned. I flung myself on my knees, and then 1 poured into 
her ear a little speech which 1 had made on the top of the 
coach. “ Divine Miss Crutty,” said I ; “ idol of my soul ! It 
was but to catch one glimpse of you that I passed through this 
garden. I never intended to breathe the secret passion ” (oh, 
no; of course not) “ which was wearing my life aw^ay. You 
know my unfortunate pre-engagement — it is broken, and for- 
ever 1 I am free ; — free, but to be your slave, — your humblest, 
fondest, truest slave ! ” And so on. 

“ Oh, Mr. Stubbs,” said she, as 1 imprinted a kiss upon hex 
cheek, “ I can’t refuse you ; but I fear you are a sad naughty 
mall. 


Tim FATAL TOO FT. 


M9 


Absorbed in the delicious reverie which was caused by the 
dear creature’s confusion, we were both silent for a while, and 
should have remained so for hours perhaps, so lost were we in 
liappiness, had I not been suddenly roused by a voice exclaim- 
ing from behind us — 

.Don't cry ^ Mary I He is a swindling^ sneaking scoundrel^ 
end you are well rid of him I " 

I turned round. O heaven, there stood Mary, weeping on 
Doctor Bates’s arm, while that miserable apothecary was looking 
at me with the utmost scorn. The gardener, who had let me 
in, had told them of my arrival, and now stood grinning behind 
them. ‘‘ Imperence ! was my Magdalen’s only exclamation, 
as she flounced by with the utmost self-possession, while I, 
glancing daggers at the spies ^ followed her. We retired to the 
parlor, where she repeated to me the strongest assurances of 
her love. 

I thought I was a made man. Alas ! I was only an April 

FOOL ! 


MAY.— RESTORATION DAY. 

As the month of May is considered, by poets and other 
philosophers, to be devoted by Nature to the great purpose of 
love-making, I may as well take advantage of that season and 
acquaint you with the result of my amours. 

Young, gay, fascinating, and an ensign — I had completely 
won the heart of my Magdalen ; and as for Miss Waters and 
her nasty uncle the Doctor, there was a complete split between 
u.s, as you may fancy ; Miss pretending, forsooth, that she was 
glad 1 had broken off the match, though she would have given 
her eyes, the little minx, to have had it on again. But this 
was out of the question. My father, who had all sorts of queer 
notions, said I had acted like a rascal in the business ; my 
mother took my part, in course, and declared I acted rightly, 
as I always did : and I got leave of absence from the regiment 
in order to press my beloved Magdalen to marry me out of 
hand — knowing, from reading and experience, the extraordi- 
nary mutability of human affairs. 

Besides, as the dear girl was seventeen years older than 
myself, and as bad in health as she was in temper, how was I 
to know that the grim king of terrors might not carry her off 
before she became mine ? Yath the tenderest warmth, then, 


750 


STORIES. 


and most delicate ardor, I continued to press my suit. The 
happy day was fixed — the ever memorable loth of May, 1792. 
The wedding-clothes were ordered ; and, to make things secure, 
I penned a little paragraph for the county paper to this effect : 
— Marriage in High Life. We understand that Ensign 
Stubbs, of the North Bungay Fencibles, and son of Thomas 
Stubbs, of Sloffemsquiggle, Esquire, is about to lead to the 
hymneneal altar the lovely and accomplished daughter of Solo- 
mon Crutty, Esquire, of the same place. A fortune of twenty 
thousand pounds is, we hear, the lady’s portion. ‘ None but 
the brave deserve the fair.’ ” 

* ^ * 

“ Have you informed your relatives, my beloved } ” said I 
to Magdalen one day after sending the above notice; “will 
any of them attend at your marriage } ” 

“Uncle Sam will, I dare say,” said Miss Crutty, “dear 
mamma’s brother.” 

“ And who was your dear mamma ? ” said I : for Miss 
Crutty’s respected parent had been long since dead, and I 
never heard her name mentioned in the family. 

Magdalen blushed, and cast down her eyes to the ground. 
“ Mamma was a foreigner,” at last she said. 

“ And of what country ? ” 

“ A German. Papa married her when she was very young : 
— she was not of a very good family,” said Miss Crutty, hesi- 
tating. 

“ And what care I for family, my love ! ” said I, tenderly 
kissing the knuckles of the hand which I held. “ She must 
have been an angel who gave birth to you.” 

“ She was a shoemaker’s daughter.” 

German shoc 7 naker ! Hang ’em ! ” thought I, “I have 
had enough of them ; ” and so broke up this conversation, 
which did not somehow please me. 

***** 

Well, the day was drawing near : the clothes were ordered ; 
the banns were read. My dear mamma had built a cake about 
the size of a washing-tub ; and I was only waiting for a week 
to pass to put me in possession of twelve thousand pounds in 
the Five per Cents., as they were in those days, heaven bless 
’em ! Little did I know the storm that was brewing, and the 
disappointment which was to fall upon a young man who really 
did his best to get a fortune. 

***** 

“ Oh, Pcobert ! ” said my Magdalen to me, two days before 


THE FATAL BOOTS, 


*^55 

75- 


the match was to come off, ‘‘ I have such a kind letter from 
uncle Sam in London. I wrote to him as you wished. He 
says that he is coming down to-morrow \ that he has heard of 
you often, and knows your character very well ; and that he 
has got a very handsome p7'ese7it for us ! What can it be, 1 
wonder 't ” 

Is he rich, my soul’s adored ? ” says L 

‘‘ He is a bachelor, with a fine trade, and nobody to leave 
his money to.” 

“ His present can’t be less than a thousand pounds 1 ” says 1. 

Or perhaps, a silver tea-set, and some corner-dishes,” says 

she. 

But we could not agree to this : *it was too little — too mean 
for a man of her uncle’s wealth ; and we both determined it 
must be the thousand pounds. 

Dear good uncle ! he’s to be here by the coach,” says 
Magdalen. “ Let us ask a little party to meet him.” And so 
we did, and so they came : my father and mother, old Crutty 
in his best wig, and the parson who was to marry us the next 
day. The coach was to come in at six. And there was the 
tea-table, and there was the punch-bowl, and everybody ready 
and smiling to receive our dear uncle from London. 

Six o’clock came, and the coach, and the man from the 
“ Green Dragon ” with a portmanteau, and a fat old gentleman 
walking behind, of whom I just caught a glimpse — a venerable 

old gentleman : I thought I’d seen him before. 

* :^ * * * * * 

Then there was a ring at the bell ; then a scuffling and 
bumping in the passage : then old Crutty rushed out, and a 
great laughing and talking, and How a7'c you ? ” and so on, 
was heard at the door ; and then the parlor door \vas flung 
open, and Crutty cried out with a loud voice — 

Good people all ! my brother-in-law, Mr. Stiffelkind ! ” 

Mr. Stiffelkmd ! — I trembled as I heard the name ! 

Miss Crutty kissed him ; mamma made him a curtsey, and 
papa made him a bow ; and Dr. Snorter, the parson, seized his 
hand and shook it most warmly : then came my turn ! 

“Vat! ’’says he. “It is my dear goot yong frend from 
Doctor Schvis’hentail’s ! is dis de yong gentleman’s honorable 
moder ” (mamma smiled and made a curtsey), “ and dis his 
fader ? Sare and madam, you should be broud of soch a sonn. 
And you my niece, if you have him for a husband you vill be 
locky, dat is all. Vat dink you, broder Croty, and Madame 
Stobbs, I ’avc made your sonn’s boots ! Ha — ha ! ” 


STOKIES. 


.52 


My nKimma laughed, and said, “ I did not know it, but I 
am sure, sir, he has as pretty a leg for a boot as any in the 
whole county.” 

Old Stiffelkind roared louder. “ A very nice leg, ma’am, 
and a very sheaf> boot too. Vat! did you not know I make 
his boots ? Perhaps you did not know something else too — 
p'raps you did not know ” (and here the monster clapped his 
hand on the table and made the punch-ladle tremble in the 
bowl) — “ p’raps you did not know as dat yong man, dat 
Stobbs, dat sneaking, baltry, squinting fellow, is as vicked as 
he is ogly. He bot a pair of boots from me and never paid for 
dem. Dat is noting, nobody never pays ; but he bought a pair 
of boots, and called himself Lord Cornvallis. And I was fool 
enough to believe him vonce. But look you, niece Magdalen, 
I ’ave got five tousand pounds : if you marry him I vill not give 
you a benny. But look you what I will gif you : I bromised 
you a bresent, and I will give you desk ! ” 

And the old monster produced those very boots which 
Swishtail had made him take back. 

^ ^ ^ ^ 

I did7it marry Miss Crutty : I am not sorry for it though. 
She was a nasty, ugly, ill-tempered wretch, and I’ve always said 
so ever since. 

And all this rose from these infernal boots, and that unlucky 
paragraph in the county paper — I’ll tell you how. 

In the first place, it was taken up as a quiz by one of the 
wicked, profligate, unprincipled organs of the London press, 
who chose to be very facetious about the Marriage in High 
Life,” and made all sorts of jokes about me and my dear Miss 
Crutty. 

Secondly, it was read in this London paper by my mortal 
enemy. Bunting, who had been introduced to old Stiffelkind 's 
acquaintance by my adventure with him, and had his shoes 
made regularly by that foreign upstart. 

Thirdly, he happened to want a pair of shoes mended at this 
particular period, and as he was measured by the disgusting 
old High-Dutch cobbler, he told him his old friend Stubbs was 
going to be married. 

“ And to whom ?” said old Stiffelkind. “To a voman wit 
gold, I vill take my oath.” 

“ Yes,” says Bunting, “ a country girl — a Miss Magdalen 
Carotty or (.’rotty, at a place called Sloffemsquiggle.” 

SrJiIoffnusck7oi''yrI bursts out the dreadful Iwotmakcr. 
“ Mein C.iott, mein Cntt I das gciii iiicin I I tell you, sare. ii is 


THE EATAL BOOTS. 


p5 


no go. Miss Crotty is my niece. 1 vill go down myself. I 
vill never let her marry dat goot-for-nothing schwindler and 
tief.’’ Such was the language that the scoundrel ventured to 
use regarding me ! 


JUNE.— MARROWBONES AND CLEAVERS. 

Was there ever such confounded ill-luck My whole life 
has been a tissue of ill-luck ; although I have labored perhaps 
harder than any man to make a fortune, something always 
tumbled it down. In love and in war I was not like others. 
In my marriages, I had an eye to the main chance ; and you 
see how some unlucky blow would come and throw them over. 
In the army I was just as prudent, and just as unfortunate. 
What with judicious betting, and horse-swopping, good-luck at 
billiards, and economy, I do believe I put by my pay every 
year, — and that is what few can say who have but an allowance 
of a hundred a year. 

I’ll tell you hov/ it was. I used to be very kind to the 
young men ; I chose their horses for them, and their wine : and 
showed them how to play billiards, or ecarte, of long mornings, 
when there was nothing better to do. I didn’t cheat : I’d 
rather die than cheat ; — but if fellows will play, I wasn’t the 
man to say no — why should I ? There was one young chap in 
our regiment of whom I really think I cleared 300/. a year. 

His name was Dobble. He was a tailor’s son, and wanted 
to be a gentleman. A poor weak young creature ; easy to be 
made tipsy ; easy to be cheated ; and easy to be frightened, 
it was a blessing for him that I found him ; for if anybody 
^else had, they would have plucked him of every shilling. 

Ensign Dobble and I were sworn friends. I rode his horses 
for him, and chose his champagne, and did everything, in fact, 
that a superior mind does for an inferior, — when the inferior 
lias got the money. We were inseparables, — hunting every- 
where in couples. We even managed to fall in love v;ith two 
sisters, as young soldiers will do, you know ; for the dogs fall 
in love, with every change of quarters. 

Well, once, in the year 1793 (it was just when the French 
lir.cl chopped poor Louis’s head off), Dobble and I, gay young 
chaps as ever wore sword bv side, had cast our eyes upon two 
young ladies by the name of Brisket, daughters of a butcher in 


STO/^/£S. 


the town where we were quartered. The dear girls fell in love 
with us, of course. And many a pleasant walk in the country, 
many a treat to a tea-garden, many a smart ribbon and brooch 
used Dobble and I (for his father allowed him 600/., and our 
purses were in common) present to these young ladies. One 
day, fancy our pleasure at receiving a note couched thus : — 

Deer Capting Stubbs and Dobble — Miss Briskets pre- 
sents their compliments, and as it is probble that our papa will 
be till twelve at the corprayshun dinner, we request the pleasure 
of their company to tea.’^ 

Didn’t we go ! Punctually at six we were in the little back 
parlor; we quaffed more Bohea, and made more love, than 
half a dozen ordinary men could. At nine, a little punch-bowl 
succeeded to the little teapot ; and, bless the girls ! a nice 
fresh steak was frizzling on the gridiron for our supper. 
Butchers were butchers then, and their parlor was their kitchen 
too; at least old Brisket’s was — one door leading into the 
shop, and one into the yard, on the other side of which was 
the slaughter-house. 

Fancy, then, our horror when, just at this critical time, we 
heard the shop door open, a heavy staggering step on the flags, 
and a loud husky voice from the shop,, shouting, “Hallo, 
Susan ; hallo, Betsy ! show a light ! ” Dobble turned as white 
as a sheet ; the two girls each as red as a lobster ; I alone pre- 
served my presence of mind. “The backdoor,” says I. — 
“The dog’s in the court,” say they. “ He’s not so bad as the 
man,” said I. “ Stop ! ” cries Susan, flinging open the door, 
and rushing to the fire. “ Take f/iis and perhaps it will quiet 
him.” 

What do you think “ f/iis ” was ? I’m blest if it was not 
the steak t 

She pushed us out, patted and hushed the dog, and was in 
again in a minute. The moon was shining on the court, and 
on the slaughter-house, where there hung the white ghastly- 
looking carcases of a couple of sheep ; a great gutter ran down 
the court — a gutter of blood ! The dog was devouring his beef- 
steak (pur beefsteak) in silence ; and we could see through the 
little window the girls bustling about to pack up the supper- 
things, and presently the shop door being opened, old Brisket 
entering, staggering, angry, and drunk. What’s more, we 
could see, perched on a high stool, and nodding politely, as if 
to salute old Brisket, the feather of Dobble' s cocked hat I When 


THE FATAL BOOTS. 


755 


Dobble saw it, he turned white, and deadly sick ; and the poor 
fellow, in an agony of fright, sunk shivering down upon one of 
the butcher’s cutting-blocks, which was in the yard. 

We saw old Brisket look steadily (as steadily as he could) 
at the confounded, impudent, pert, waggling feather; and 
then an idea began to dawn upon his mind, that there was n 
head to the hat ; and then he slowly rose up — he was a man oi 
six feet, and fifteen stone — he rose up, put on his apron and 
sleeves, and took doum kis cleaver, 

‘‘Betsy,’’ says he, “open the yard door.” But the poor 
girls screamed, and flung on their knees, and begged, and 
wept, and did their very best to prevent him. “ Open the 
Yard Door ! ” says he, with a thundering loud voice ; and 
the great bull-dog, hearing it, started up and uttered a yell 
which sent me flying to the other end of the court. — Dobble 
couldn’t move ; he was sitting on the block, blubbering like a 
baby. 

The door opened, and out Mr. Brisket came. 

“ To him Jowler!^^ says he. Keep him yowler! ” — and 
the horrid dog flew at me, and I flew back into the corner, and 
drew my sword, determining to sell my life dearly. 

“ That’s it,” says Brisket. “ Keep him there, — good dog, 
— good dog ! And now, sir,” says he, turning round to Dobble, 
“ is this your hat ? ” 

“Yes,” says Dobble, fit to choke with fright. 

“Well, then,” sdys Brisket, “it’s my — (hie) — my painful 
duty to — (hie) — to tell you, that as I’ve got your hat, I must 
have your head ; it’s painful, but it must be done. You’d better 
— '(hie) — settle yourself com — comfumarably against that — (hie) 
- — that block, and I’ll chop it off before you can say Jack— 
(hie) — no, I mean Jack Robinson.” 

Dobble went down on his knees and shrieked out, I’m an 
only son, Mr. Brisket ! I’ll marry her, sir ; I will, upon my 
honor, sir. — Consider my mother, sir ; consider my mother.” 

“ That’s it, sir,” says Brisket — “that’s a good — (hie) — a good 
boy; — just put your head down quietly — and I’ll have it off — 
yes, off — as if you were Louis the Six — the Sixtix — the Sik- 
tickleteenth. — Til chop the other chap afterwards I' 

When I heard this, I made a sudden bound back, and gave 
such a, cry as any man might who was in such a way. The 
ferocious Jowler, thinking I was going to escape, flew at my 
throat ; screaming furious, I flung out my arms in a kind of 
desperation, — and, to my wonder, down fell the dog, dead, and 
run through the body I 


756 


STORIES 


#*##*** 

At this moment a posse of people rushed in upon old 
Brisket, — one of his daughters had had the sense to summon 
them, — and Bobbie’s head was saved. And when they saw 
the dog lying dead at my feet, my ghastly look, my bloody 
sword, they gave me no small credit for my bravery. “ A 
terrible fellow that Stubbs,” said they ; and so the mess said, 
the next day. 

I didn’t tell them that the dog liad committed suicide — why 
should I ? And I didn’t say a word about Bobbie’s cowardice. 
I said he was a brave fellow, and fought like a tiger ; and this 
prevented him from telling tales. I had the dogskin made 
into a pair of pistol-holsters, and looked so fierce, and got such 
a name for courage in our regiment, that when we had to meet 
the regulars, Bob Stubbs was always the man put forward to 
support the honor of the corps. The women, you know, adore 
courage ; and such was my reputation at this time, that I might 
have had my pick out of half a dozen, with three, four, or five 
thousand pounds apiece, who were dying for love of me and 
my red coat. But I wasn’t such a fool. I had been twice on 
the point of marriage, and twice disappointed ; and I vowed 
by all the Saints to have a wife, and a rich one. Bepend upon 
this, as an infallible maxim to guide you through life : If s as 
easy to get a rich wife as a poor one ; — the same bait that will 
hook a fly will hook a salmon. 


JULY.— SUMMARY PROCEEDINGS. 

Bobble’s reputation for courage was not increased by the 
butcher’s-dog adventure ; but mine stood very high : little 
Stubbs was voted the boldest chap of all the bold North Bun- 
gays. And though I must confess, what was proved by sub- 
sequent circumstances, that nature has not endowed me with a 
large, or even, I may say, an average share of bravery, yet a 
man is very willing to flatter himself to the contrary ; and, after 
a little time, I got to believe that my killing the dog was an 
action of undaunted courage, and that I was as gallant as any 
of the one hundred thousand heroes of our army. I always 
had a military taste — it’s only the brutal part of the profession, 
the horrid fighting and blood, that I don’t like. 

I suppose the regiment was not very brave itself — being 


THE FATAL FOOTS. 


1S1 


only militia ; but certain it was, that Stubbs was considered a 
most terrible fellow, and I swore so much, and looked so fierce, 
that you would have fancied 1 had made half a hundred cam- 
paigns. I was second in several duels : the umpire in all dis- 
putes ; and such a crack-shot myself, that fellows were shy of 
insulting me. As for Dobble, I took him under my protection ; 
and he became so attached to me, that we ate, drank, and rode 
together every day ; his father didn’t care for money, so long 
as his son was in good company — and what so good as that of 
the celebrated Stubbs 1 Heigho ! I laas good company in those 
days, and a brave fellow too, as I should have remained, but 
for— what I shall tell the public immediately. 

It happened, in the fatal year ninety-six, that the brave 
North Bungays were quartered at Portsmouth, a maritime place, 
which I need not describe, and which I wish I had never seen. 
I might have been a General now, or, at least, a rich man. 

The red-coats carried everything before them in those days ; 
and 1, such a crack character as I was in my regiment, was very 
well received by the townspeople : many dinners I had ; many 
tea-parties ; many lovely young ladies did I lead down the 
pleasant country-dances. 

Well, although I had had the two former rebuffs in love 
which I have described, my heart was still young ; and the fact 
was, knowing that a girl with a fortune was my only chance, I 
made love here as furiously as ever. I sha’n’t describe the 
lovely creatures on whom I fixed, whilst at Portsmouth. I tried 
more than — several — and it is a singular fact, which I never 
have been able to account for, that, successful as I was with 
ladies of maturer age, by the young ones I was refused regular. 

But ‘‘ faint heart never won fair lady ; ” and so I went on, 
and on, until I had got a Miss Clopper, a tolerably rich navy- 
contractor’s daughter, into such away, that I really don’t think 
she could have refused me. Her brother. Captain Clopper, was 
in a line regiment, and helped me as much as ever he could : he 
swore I was such a brave fellow. 

As I had received a number of attentions from Clopper, I 
determined to invite him to dinner ; which I could do without 
any sacrifice of my principle upon this point : for the fact is, 
Dobble lived at an inn, and as he sent all his bills to his father, 
I made no scruple to use his table. We dined in the coffee- 
room, Dobble bringing his friend ; and so we made a party 
('any., as the French say. Some naval officers w^ere occupied 
in a similar way at a table next to ours. 

Well — I didn’t spare the bottle, either for myself or for my 


STOKJES, 


75 ^ 

friends ; and we grew very talkative, and very affectionate as 
the drinking went on. Each man told stories of his gallantry 
in the field, or amongst the ladies, as officers will, after dinner. 
Clopper confided to the company his wish that I should marry 
his sister, and vowed that he thought me the best fellow in 
Christendom. 

Ensign Dobble assented to this. “ But let Miss Clopper 
beware,’^ says he, “ for Stubbs is a sad fellow : he has had I 
don’t know how rmxij liaiso^is already ; and he has been engaged 
to I don’t know how many women.” 

Indeed ! ” says Clopper. Come, Stubbs, tell us your 
adventures.” 

Psha ! ” said I, modestly, “ there is nothing, indeed, to tell. 
I have been in love, my dear boy — who has not ? — and I have 
been jilted — who has not 1 ” 

Clopper swore that he would blow his sister’s brains out if 
ever she served me so. 

“Tell him about Miss Crutty,” said Dobble. He ! he! 
Stubbs served that woman out, anyhow ; she didn’t jilt hivi. I’ll 
be sworn.” 

“ Really, Dobble, you are too bad, and should not mention 
names. The fact is, the girl was desperately in love with me, 
and had money — sixty thousand pounds, upon my reputation. 
Well, everything was arranged, when who should come down 
from London but a relation.” 

“ Well, and did he prevent the match ? ” 

“ Prevent it — yes, sir, I believe you he did ; though not in 
the sense that you mean. He would have given his eyes — ay, 
and ten thousand pounds more — if I would have accepted the 
fgirl, but I would not.” 

“ Why, in the name of goodness ? ” 

“ Sir, her uncle was a shoemakcT. I never would debase 
myself by marrying into such a family.” 

“Of course not,” said Dobble; “he couldn’t, you know. 
Well, now — tell him about the other girl, Mary Waters, you 
know.” 

“ Hush, Dobble, hush ! don’t you see one of those naval 
officers has turned round and heard you ? My dear Clopper, it 
was a mere childish bagatelle.” 

“Well, but let’s have it,” said Clopper — “let’s have it. I 
won’t tell my sister, you know.” And he put his hand to his 
nose and looked monstrous wise. 

“ Nothing of that sort, Clopper — no, no — ’pon honor — lit- 
tle Bob Stubbs is no libertine ; and the story is very simple 


TT7E FATAL BOOTS. 


759 


You see that my father has a small place, merely a few hundred 
acres, at Sloffemsquiggle. Isn’t it a funny name ? Hang it, 
there’s the naval gentleman staring again ” — (I looked terribly 
fierce as I returned this officer’s stare, and continued in a loud 
careless voice). Well, at this Sloffemsquiggle there lived a 
girl, a Miss Waters, the niece of some blackguard apothecary 
in the neighborhood ; but my mother took a fancy to the girl, 
and had her up to the park and petted her. We were both 
young — and — and — the girl fell in love with me, that’s the fact. 
1 was obliged to repel some rather warm advances that she 
made me ; and here, upon my honor as a gentleman, you have 
all the story about which that silly Dobble makes such a 
noise.” 

Just as I finished this sentence, I found myself suddenly 
taken by the nose, and a voice shouting out, — 

Mr. Stubbs, you are a Liar and a Scoundrel ! Take 
this, sir, — and this, for daring to meddle with the name of an 
innocent lady.” 

I turned round as well as I could — for the ruffian had pulled 
me out of my chair — and beheld a great marine monster, six feet 
high, who was occupied in beating and kicking me, in the most 
ungentlemanly manner, on my cheeks, my ribs, and between the 
tails of my coat. He is a liar, gentlemen, and a scoundrel ! 
The bootmaker had detected him in swindling, and so his 
niece refused him. Miss Waters was engaged to him from 
childhood, and he deserted her for the bootmaker’s niece, 
who was richer.” — And then sticking a card between my stock 
and my coat-collar, in what is called the scruff of my neck, the 
disgusting brute gave me another blow behind my back, and 
left the coffee-room with his friends. 

Dobble raised me up ; and taking the card from my neck, 
read. Captain Waters. Clopper poured me out a glass of 
water, and said in my ear, If this is true, you are an infernal 
scoundrel, Stubbs ; and must fight me, after Captain Waters ; ” 
and he flounced out of the room. 

I had but one course to pursue. I sent the Captain a short 
and contemptuous note, saying that he was beneath my anger. 
As for Clopper, I did not condescend to notice his remark ; 
but in order to get rid of the troublesome society of these low 
blackguards, I determined to gratify an inclination I had long 
entertained, and make a little tour. I applied for leave of 
absence, and set off that very night, I can fancy the disap- 
pointment of the brutal Waters, on coming, as he did, the next 
morning to my quarters and finding me gone, Ha ! ha ! 


760 


S'J'OKIES. 


After this adventure I became sick of a military life — at 
least the life of my own regiment, where the officers, such 
was their unaccountable meanness and prejudice against me, 
absolutely refused to see me at mess. Colonel Craw sent me 
a letter to this effect, which I treated as it deserved. — I 
never once alluded to it in any way, and have since never 
spoken a single word to any man in the North Bungay s. 


AUGUST.— DOGS HAVE THEIR DAYS. 

See, now, what life is ! I have had ill-luck on ill-luck from 
that day to this. I have sunk in the world, and, instead of 
riding my horse and drinking my wine, as a real gentleman 
should, have hardly enough now to buy a pint of ale ; ay, and 
am very glad wdien anybody will treat me to one. Why, why 
was I born to undergo such unmerited misfortunes 

You must know that ver}^ soon after my adventure with 
Miss Crutty, and that cow^ardly ruffian. Captain Waters (he 
sailed the day after his insult to me, or I should most certainly 
have blowmhis brains out ; now he is living in England, and is my 
relation ; but, of course, 1 cut the fellow) — very soon after these 
painful events another happened, which ended, too, in a sad 
disappointment. My dear papa died, and instead of leaving 
five thousand pounds, as I expected at the very least, left only 
his estate, which was w’orth but two. The land and house were 
left to me ; to mamma and my sisters he left, to be sure, a sum 
of two thousand pounds in the hands of that eminent firm 
Messrs. Pump, Aldgate and Co., which failed within six months 
after his demise, and paid in five years about one shilling and 
ninepence in the pound ; which really was all my dear mother 
and sisters had to live upon. 

The poor creatures were quite unused to money matters ; 
and would you believe it ? when the news came of Pump and 
Aldgate’s failure, mamma only smiled, and threw her eyes up 
to heaven, and said, ‘‘ Blessed be God, that we have still where- 
withal to live. There are tens of thousands in this world, dear 
children, who would count our poverty riches.^’ And with this 
she kissed my two sisters, who began to blubber, as girls 
always will do, and threw their arms round her neck, and then 
round my neck, until I was half stifled with their embraces, 
and slobbered all over with their tears. 


THE FATAL FOOTE. 


761 

‘^Dearest mamma,” said I, am very glad to see the 
noble manner in which you bear your loss ; and more still to 
know that you are so rich as to be able to put up with it/*' 
The fact was, I really thought the old lady had got a private 
hoard of her own, as many of them have — a thousand pounds 
or so in a stocking. Had she put by thirty pounds a year, as 
well she might, for the thirty years of her marriage, there 
would have been nine hundred pounds clear, and no mistake. 
But still I was angry to think that any such paltry conceab 
ment had been practised — concealment too of my money ; so 
I turned on her pretty sharply, and continued my speech. 
“You say, ma’am, that you are rich, and that Pump and Aid- 
gate’s failure has no effect upon you. I am very happy to 
hear you say so, Ma’am — very happy that you are rich ; and I 
should like to know v/here your property, my father’s property, 
for you had none of your own, — I should like to know where 
this money lies — where you have concealed it^ Ma’am ; and per- 
mit me to say, that when I agreed to board you and my two 
sisters for eighty pounds a year, I did not know that you had 
resources than those mentioned in blessed father’s will.” 

This I said to her because I hated the meanness of conceal- 
ment, not because I lost by the bargain of boarding them : f<br 
the three poor things did not eat much more than sparrows ; 
and I’ve often since calculated that I had a clear twenty 
pounds a year profit out of them. 

Mamma and the girls looked quite astonished when I made 
the speech. “ What does he mean ? ” said Lucy to Eliza. 

Mamma repeated the question. “ My beloved Robert, 
what concealment are you talking of ? ” 

“ I am talking of concealed property. Ma'am,” says I 
sternly. 

“ And do you — what — can you — do you really suppose that 
I have concealed — any of that blessed sa-a-a-aint’s prop-op-op- 
operty ? ” screams out mamma. “ Robert,” says she — “ Bob, 
my own darling boy — my fondest, best beloved, now he is gone ” 
(meaning my late governor — more tears) — “you don’t, you can- 
not fancy that your own mother, who bore you, and nursed 
you,and wept for you, and would give her all to save you from 
a moment’s harm — you don’t suppose that she would che-e-e- 
eat you ! ” And here she gave a louder screech than ever, and 
flung back on the sofa ; and one of my sisters went and 
tumbled into her arms, and t’other went round, and the kiss- 
ing an slobbering scene went on again, only I was left out, 
thank goodness. I hate such sentimentality. 


STORIES. 


762 


“ Che-e-e-eat says I, mocking her. What do you 
mean, then, by saying you’re so rich ? Say, have you got 
money, or have you not ? (And 1 rapped out a good number 
of oaths, too, which I don’t put in here j but I was in a dread- 
ful fury, that’s the fact.) 

So help me heaven,” says mamma, in answer, going down 
on her knees and smacking her two hands, “ I have but a 
Queen Anne’s guinea in the whole of this wicked world.” 

Then what. Madam, induces you to tell these absurd 
stories to me, and to talk about your riches, when you know 
that you and your daughters are beggars. Ma’am — beggars ? ” 

My dearest boy, have we not got the house, and the furni- 
ture, and a hundred a year still : and have you not great talents, 
which will make all our fortunes ? ” says Mrs. Stubbs, getting 
up off her knees, and making believe to smile as she clawed 
hold of my hand and kissed it. 

This was too cool. You have got a hundred a year. 
Ma’am,” says I — '‘'‘you have got a house ? Upon my soul and 
honor this is the first I ever heard of it ; and I’ll tell you what. 
Ma’am,” says I (and it cut her pretty sharply too) : “ As you’ve 
got it., you’ d better go and live in it. I’ve got quite enough to 
do with my own house, and every penny of my own income.” 

Upon this speech the old lady said nothing, but she gave a 
screech loud enough to be heard from here to York, and down 
she fell — kicking and struggling in a regular fit. 

* * # * * 

I did not see Mrs. Stubbs for some days after this, and the 
girls used to come down to meals, and never speak ; going up 
again and stopping with their mother. At last, one day, both 
of them came in very solemn to my study, and Eliza, the 
eldest, said, “ Robert, mamma has paid you our board up to 
Michaelmas.” 

“She has,” says I; for I always took precious good care 
to have it in advance. 

“ She says, Robert, that on Michaelmas day — we’ll — we’ll 
go away, Robert.” 

“Oh, she’s going to her own house, is she, Lizzy Very 
good. She’ll want the furniture, I suppose, and that she may 
have too, for I’m going to sell the place myself.” And so that 
matter was settled. 

# * * * * 

On Michaelmas day — and during these two months I hadn't, 
I do believe, seen my mother twice (once, about two o’clock in 
the morning, I woke and found her sobbing over my bed) — on 


THE FATAL BOOTS. 


763 

Michael mas-day morning, Eliza comes to me and says, “ Robert 
they will conie cmd fetch ics at six this evenmgR Well, as this was 
the last day, 1 went and got the best goose 1 could find (I 
don’t think I ever saw a primer, or ate more hearty myself), 
and had it roasted at three, with a good pudding afterwards ; 
and a glorious bowl of punch. “ Here’s a health to you, dear 
girls,” says I, “ and you, Ma, and good luck to all three ; and 
as you’ve not eaten a morsel, I hope you won’t object to a glass 
of punch. It’s the old stuff, you know. Ma’am, that Waters 
sent to my father fifteen years ago.” 

Six o’clock came, and with it came a fine barouche. As I 
live, Captain Waters was on the box (it was his coach) ; that 
old thief, Bates, jumped out, (intered my house, and before I 
could say Jack Robinson, whipped off mamma to the carriage : 
the girls followed, just giving me a hasty shake of the hand 
and as mamma was helped in, Mary Waters, who was sitting 
inside, flung her arms round her, and the girls ; and the Doc- 
tor, who acted footman, jumped on the box, and off they went ; 
taking ho more notice of 7?ie than if I’d been a nonentity. 

Here’s a picture of the whole business : — Mamma and 
Miss Waters are sitting kissing each other in the carriage, 
with the two girls in the back seat ; Waters is driving (a pre- 
cious bad driver he is too) ; and I’m standing at the garden 
door, and whistling. That old fool Mary Malowney is crying 
behind the garden gate : she went off next day along with the 
furniture ; and I to get into that precious scrape which I shall 
mention next. 


SEPTEMBER.— PLUCKING A GOOSE. 

After my papa’s death, as he left me no money, and only 
a little land, I put my estate into an auctioneer’s hands, and 
determined to amuse my solitude with a trip to some of our 
fashionable watering-places. My house was now a desert to 
me. I need not say how the departure of my dear parent, and 
her children, left me sad and lonely. 

Well, I had a little ready money, and, for the estate, ex- 
pected a couple of thousand pounds. I had a good military- 
looking person : for though I had absolutely cut the old North 
Rungays (indeed, after my affair with Waters, Colonel Craw 
hinted to me, in the most friendly manner, that I had better 
resign) — though I had left the army, I still retained the rank 

49 


STORIES. 


764 

of Captain ; knowing the advantages attendant upon that title 
in a watering-place tour. 

Captain Stubbs became a great dandy at Cheltenham, 
Harrogate, Bath, Leamington, and other places. I was a good 
whist and billiard player ; so much so, that in many of these 
towns, the people used to refuse, at last, to play with me, 
knowing how far I was their superior. Fancy my surprise, 
about five years after the Portsmouth affair, when strolling one 
day up the High Street, in Leamington, my eyes lighted upon 
a young man, whom I remembered in a certain butcher’s yard, 
and elsewhere — no other, in fact, than Dobble. He, too, was 
dressed e7i militaire., with a frogged coat and spurs ; and was 
walking with a showy-looking, Jewish-faced, black-haired lady, 
glittering with chains and rings, with a green bonnet and a 
bird of Paradise — a lilac shawl, a yellow gown, pink silk stock- 
ings, and light-blue shoes. Three children, and a handsome 
footman, were walking behind her, and the party, not seeing 
me, entered the “ Royal Hotel ” together. 

1 was known myself at the ‘‘Royal,” and calling one of the 
waiters, learned the names of the lady and gentleman. He 
was Captain Dobble, the son of the rich army-clothier, Dobble 
(Dobble, Hobble and Co. of Pall Mall) ; — the lady was a Mrs. 
Manasseh, widow of an American Jew, living quietly at Leam- 
ington with her children, but possessed of an immense property. 
There’s no use to give one’s self out to be an absolute pauper ; 
so the fact is, that I myself went everywhere with the character 
of a man of very large means. My father had died, leaving 
me immense sums of money, and landed estates. Ah ! I was 
the gentleman then, the real gentleman, and everybody was 
too happy to have me at table. 

Well, I came the next day and left a card for Dobble, with a. 
note. He neither returned my visit, nor answered my note. 
The day after, however, I met him with the widow^, as before ; 
and going up to him, very kindly seized him by the hand, and 
swore I was — as really was the case — charmed to see him. 
Dobble hung back, to my surprise, and I do believe the crea- 
ture would have cut me, if he dared ; but I gave him a frown, 
and said — 

“ What, Dobble my boy, don’t you recollect old Stubbs, and 
our adventure with the butcher's daughters — ha ? ” 

Dobble gave a sickly kind of grin, and said, ‘‘ Oh ! ah ! yes ! 
It is — yes! it is, I believe, Captain Stubbs.” 

•‘An old comrade, Madam, of ('aptain l‘)obble's, and one 
who has heard so much, and seen ^ o much of your ladyship, that 
he must take the liberty of begging his friend tip introduce him.” 


THE FATAL BOOTS'. 


7 ^>5 

Dobble was obliged to take the hint ; and Captain Stubbs 
v/as duly presented to Mrs. Manasseh. The lady was as gra- 
cious as possible ; and when, at the end of the walk, we parted, 
she said “ she hoped Captain Dobble would bring me to her 
apartments that evening, where she expected a few friends.’^ 
h^verybody, you see, knows everybody at Leamington ; and I, 
for my part, was v/ell known as a retired officer of the army, 
who, on his father’s death, had come into seven thousand a 
year. Bobbie’s arrival had been subsequent to mine ; but put- 
ting up as he did at the ‘‘Royal Hotel,” and dining at the ordi- 
nary there with the widow, he had made her acquaintance before 
I had. I saw, however, that if I allowed him to talk about me, 
as he could, I should be compelled to give up all my hopes 
and pleasures at Leamington ; and so I determined to be short 
with him. As soon as the lady had gone into the hotel, my 
friend Dobble was for leaving me likewise ; but I stopped him. 
and said, “ Mr. Dobble, I saw what you meant just now : you 
wanted to cut me, because, forsooth, I did not choose to fight 
a duel at Portsmouth. Now look you, Dobble, I am no hero, 
but Fm not such a coward as you — and you know it. You are 
a very different man to deal with from Waters ; and Twill fight 
this time.” 

Not perhaps that I would : but after the business of the 
butcher, I knew Dobble to be as great a coward as ever lived ; 
and there never was any harm in threatening, for you know 
you are not obliged to stick to it afterwards. My words had 
their effect upon Dobble, who stuttered and looked red, and 
then declared he never had the slightest intention of passing 
me by ; so we became friends, and his mouth was stopped. 

He was very thick with the widow, but that lady had a very 
capacious heart, and there were a number of other gentlemen 
who seemed equally smitten with her. “ Look at that Mrs. 
Manasseh/’ said a gentleman (it was droll, he was a Jew, too) 
sitting at dinner by me. “ She is old, and ugly, and yet, be: 
cause she has money, all the men are flinging themselves at 
her.” 

“ She has money, has she ?” 

“ Eighty thousand pounds, and twenty thousand for each of 
her children. 1 know it fo7' a fact, said the strange gentleman. 
“ I am in the law, and we of our faith, you know, know pretty 
well what the great families amongst us are worth.” 

“ Who was Mr. Manasseh ? ” said 1. 

“ A man of enormous wealth — a tobacco merchant — West 
Indies; a fellow of no birth, however; and who, between our- 
selves, married a woman that is not much better than she should 


STORIES. 


yes 

be. My dear sir,’’ whispered he, “she is always in love. Now 
it is with that Captain Dobble ; last week it was somebody else 
— and it may be you next week, if — ha ! ha ! ha! — you are dis, 
posed to enter the lists. I wouldn’t, for my part, have the 
woman with twice her money.” 

What did it matter to me whether the woman was good or 
not, provided she was rich ? My course was quite clear. I 
told Dobble all that this gentleman had informed me,' and being 
a pretty good hand at making a story, I made the widow appear 
so bad, that the poor fellow was quito. frightened, and fairly 
quitted the field. Ha ! ha ! I’m dashed if I did not make 
him believe that Mrs. Manasseh had murdered her last husband. 

I played my game so well, thanks to the information that 
my friend the lawyer had given me, that in a month I had got 
the widov/ to show a most decided partiality for me. I sat by 
her at dinner, I drank with her at the “Wells ” — I rode with 
her, I danced with her, and at a picnic to Kenilworth, where we 
drank a good deal of champagne, I actually popped the ques- 
tion, and was accepted. In another month, Robert Stubbs, 
Esq., led to the altar, Leah, widow of the late Z. Manasseh, 
Esq., of St. Kitt’s ! 

***** 

We drove up to London in her comfortable chariot : the 
children and servants following in a post-chaise. I paid, of 
course, for everything ; and until our house in Berkeley Square 
was painted, we stopped at “ Stevens’s Hotel.” 

* * * * * ■ 

My own estate had been sold, and the money was lying at 

a bank in the City. About three days after our arrival, as we 
took our breakfast in the hotel, previous to a visit to Mrs. 
Stubbs’s banker, wLere certain little transfers were to be made, 
a gentleman was introduced, who, I saw at a glance, was of my 
wife’s persuasion. 

Pie looked at Mrs. Stubbs, and made a bow. “ Perhaps it 
will be convenient to you to pay this little bill, one hundred and 
fifty-two pounds ? ” 

“ My love,” says she, “ will you pay this — it is a trifle which 
1 had really forgotten 1 ” 

“ My soul ! ” said I, “ I have really not the money in the 
house.” 

“ Vel, denn. Captain Shtubbsh,” says he, “I must do my 
duty — and arrest you — here is the writ ! 'Pom, keep the door ! ” 
— My wife fainted — the children screamed, and I fancy my 
condition as I was obliged to march off to a sponging-house 
along with a horrid sheriff’s officer ! 


THE EATAL BOOTS. 


767 


OCTOBER.— MARS AND VENUS IN OPPOSITION 

I SHALL not describe my feelings when I found myself in a 
cage in Cursitor Street, instead of that fine house in Berkeley 
Square, which was to have been mine as the husband of Mrs„ 
Manasseh. What a place ! — in an odious, dismal street lead- 
ing from Chancery Lane. A hideous Jew boy opened the sec- 
ond of the three doors and shut it when Mr. Nabb and I (al- 
most fainting) had entered ; then he opened the third door, and 
then I was introduced to a filthy place called a coffee-room, 
which I exchanged for the solitary comfort of a little dingy 
back parlor, where I was left for a while to brood over my 
miserable fate. F^ncy the change bet'..v.cn this and Berkeley 
Square ! Was I, after all my pains, and cleverness, and perse- 
verance, cheated at last } Had this Mrs. Manasseh been im- 
posing upon me, and were the words of the wretch I met at tlie 
table-d’hote at Leamington only meant to mislead me and take 
me in ? I determined to send for my wife, and know the whole 
truth. I saw at once that I had been the victim of an infernal 
plot, and that the carriage, the house in town, the West India 
fortune, were only so many lies which I had blindly believed. 
It was true the debt was but a hundred and fifty pounds ; and 
I had two thousand at my bankers’. But was the loss of her 
80,000/. nothing ? Was the destruction of my hopes nothing ? 
The accursed addition to my family of a Jewish wife and three 
Jewish children, nothing 1 And all these I was to support out 
of my two thousand pounds. I had better have stopped at 
home with my mamma and sisters, whom I really did love, and 
who produced me eighty pounds a year. 

I had a furious interview with Mrs. Stubbs ; and when 1 
charged her, the base wretch ! with cheating me, like a brazen 
serpent as she was, she flung back the cheat in my teeth, and 
swore I had swindled her. Why did I marry her, when she 
might have had twenty others ? She only took me, she said, 
because I had twenty thousand pounds. I had said I possessed 
that sum ; but in love, you know, and war all’s fair. 

We parted quite as angrily as we met ; and I cordially vowed 
that when I had paid the debt into which I had been swindled 
by her, I would take my 2,000/. ^nd depart to some desert island ; 
or, at the very least, to America, and never see her more, or 
any of her Israelitish brood. There was no use in remaining 


768 


S70K/ES. 


in the sponging-hoiise (for 1 knew that there were such things 
as detainers, and that where "Mrs. Stubbs owed a hundred 
pounds, she migdit owe a thousand) : so I sent for Mr. Nabb, 
and tendering him a check for 150/. and his costs, requested 
to be let out forthwith. Here, fellow,’^ said I, “ is a check 
on Child’s for your paltr}^ sum.” 

It may be a sheck on Shild’s,” says Mr. Nabb ; “ but I 
should be a baby to let you out on such a paper as dat.” 

Well,” said I, Child’s is but a step from this : you may 
go and get the cash, — just give me an acknowledgment.” 

Nabb drew out the acknowledgment with great punctuality, 
and set off for the bankers’, whilst I prepared myself for de- 
parture from this abominable prison. 

He smiled as he came in. ‘‘Well,” said I, “you have 
touched your money ; and now, I must tell you, that you are 
the most infernal rogue and extortioner I ^ver met with.” 

“ Oh, no, Mishter Shtubbsh,” says he, grinning still. “ Dere 
is some greater roag dan me, — -mosh greater.” 

“ Fellow,” said I, “ don’t stand grinning before a gentle- 
man ; but give me my hat and cloak, and let me leave your 
filthy den.” 

“ Shtop, Shtubbsh,” says he, not even Mistering me this 
time. “ Here ish a letter, vich you had better read.” 

I opened the letter ; something fell to the ground : — it was 
my check. 

The letter ran thus : “ Messrs. Child and Co. present their 
compliments to Captain Stubbs, and regret that they have been 
obliged to refuse payment of the enclosed, having been served 
this day with an attachment by Messrs. Solomon^on and Co., 
which compels them to retain Captain Stubbs’ balance of 
2,010/. IIS. 6 d. until the decision of the suit of Solomonson v. 
Stubbs. Fleet Street 

“ You see,” says Mr. Nabb, as I read this dreadful letter — 
“you see, Shtubbsh, dere vas two debts, — a little von and a big 
von. So dey arrested you for de little von, and attashed your 
money for de big von.” 

Don’t laugh at me for telling this story. If you knew what 
tears' are blotting over the paper as I write it — if you knew that 
for weeks after I was more like a madman than a sane man, — 
a madman in the Fleet Prison, where I went instead of to the 
desert island! What had I done to deserve it? Hadn’t I 
always kept an eye to the main chance ? Hadn’t I lived econ- 
omically, and not like other young men ? Had I ever been 
known to squander or give away a single penny ? No ! I can 


THE FATAL TOOTS. , 769 

lay my hand on my heart, and, thank heaven, say. No ! \^'hy, 

was 1 punished so ? 

Let me conclude this miserable history. Seven months — 
my wife saw me once or twice, and then dropped me altogether 
— I remained in that fatal place. I wrote to my dear mamma, 
begging her to sell her furniture, but got no answer. All my 
old friends turned their backs upon me. My action went 
against me — I had not a penny to defend it. Solomonson 
proved my wife’s debt, and seized my two thousand pounds. 
As for the detainer against me, I was obliged to go through the 
court for the relief of insolvent debtors. I passed through it, 
and came out a beggar. But fancy the malice of that wicked 
Stiffelkind : he appeared in court as my creditor for 3/., with 
sixteen years’ interest at five per cent., for a pair of top-boots. 
The old thief produced them in court, and told the whole story 
■ — Lord Cornwallis, the detection, the pumping and all. 

Commissioner Dubobwig was very funny about it. “So 
Doctor Swishtail would not pay you for the boots, eh, Mr. Stif- 
felkind ? ’' 

“ No : he said, ven I asked him for payment, dey was 
ordered by a yong boy, and I ought to have gone to his school- 
master.” 

“ What ! then you came on a bootless errand, ay, sir ? ” (A 
laugh.) 

“ Bootless ! no sare, I brought de boots back vid me. How 
de devil else could I show dem to you ? ” (Another laugh.) 

“ You’ve never soled ’em since, Mr. Tickleshins ? ” 

“ I never would sell dem ; I svore I never vood, on porpus 
to be revenged on dat Stobbs.” 

“ What ! your wound has never been healed^ eh ? ” 

“Vat de you mean vid your bootless errands, and your 
soling and healing ? I tell you I have done vat I svore to do : 
I have exposed him at school ; 1 h'ave broak olf a marriage for 
him, ven he vould have had tventy tousand pound ; and now I 
have showed him up in a court of justice. Dat is vat I ’ave 
done, and dat’s enough.” And then the old wretch went down, 
whilst everybody was giggling and staring at poor me — as if I 
was not miserable enough already. 

“ This seems the dearest pair of boots you ever had in your 
life, Mr. Stubbs,” said Commissioner Dubobwig very archly, 
and then he began to inquire about the rest of my misfortunes. 

!n the fulness of my heart I told him the whole of them : 
how Mr. Solomonson the attorney had introduced me to the 
rich widow, Mrs. Manasseh, who had lift}’ thousand pounds, 


770 


S7'OAV£S. 


and an estate in the West Indies. How I was married, and 
arrested on coming to town, and cast in an action for two 
thousand pounds brought against me by this very Solomonson 
for my wife’s debts. 

“ Stop ! ” says a lawyer in the court. “ Is this woman a 
showy, black-haired w'oman with one eye? very often drunk, 
with three children ? — Solomonson, short, wdth red hair ? ’’ 

‘‘ Exactly so,” said I, wdth tears in my eyes. 

‘‘Thatw’oman has married f/iree men within the last iv.v 
years. One in Ireland, and one at Bath. A Solomonson i , 
I believe, her husband, and they both are off for America ten 
days ago.” 

“ But wdiy did you not keep your 2,000/. ? ” said the lawyer. 

Sir, they attached it.”^ 

'‘Oh, well, w’e may pass you. You have been unlucky, Mr. 
Stubbs, but it seems as if the biter had been bit in this affair.” 

“ No,” said Mr. Dubobwig. “ Mr. Stubbs is the victim of 

a FATAL ATTACHMENT.” 


NOVEMBER.— A GENERAL POST DELIVERY. 

I WAS a free man when I went out of the Court ; but I was 
a beggar — I, Captain Stubbs, of the bold North Bungays, did 
not know where I cbuld get a bed, or a dinner. 

As I Avas marching sadly dowm Portugal Street, I felt a 
hand on my shoulder and a rough voice ^yhich I knew^ well. 

“Veil, Mr. Stobbs, have .1 not kept my promise? I told 
you dem boots would be your ruin.” 

I was much too miserable to reply ; and only cast my eyes 
towards the roofs of the houses, which I could not see for the 
tears. 

“Vat ! you begin to gry and blobber like a shild ? you vood 
marry, vood you ? and noting vood do for you but a vife vid 
monny — ha, ha — but you vere de pigeon, and she was de grow. 
She has plocked you, too, pretty veil — eh ? ha ! ha ! ” 

“ Oh, Mr. Stihelkind,” said I, “ don’t laugh at my misery ; 
she has not left me a single shilling under heaven. And I 
sliall starve : I do believe I shall starve.” And I began to cry 
fit to break mv heart. 

“Starf ! stoff and nonsense ! You vill never die of starting 


TIIK fAlAL BOOT^. 


771 


— you vill die of hangings 1 tink — ho ! ho ! — and it is moch 
easier vay too.” I didn’t say a word, but cried on; till every- 
body in the street turned round and stared. 

“ Come, come,” said Stiffelkind, do not gry, Gaptain 
Stobbs — it is not goot for a Gaptain to gry — ha ! ha ! Dere — 
come vid me, and you shall have a dinner, and a bregfast too, 
— vich shall gost you nothing, until you can bay vid your earn- 
ings.” 

And so this curious old man, who had persecuted me all 
through my prosperity, grew compassionate towards me in my 
ill-luck ; and took me home with him as he promised. “ I saw 
your name among de Insolvents, and I vowed, you know, to 
make you repent dem boots. Dere now, it is done and for- 
gotten, look you. Here, Betty, Bettchen, make de spare bed, 
and put a clean knife and fork ; Lort Cornvallis is come to dine 
vid me.” 

I lived with this strange old man for six weeks. I kept Ins 
books, and did what little I could to make myself useful ; 
carrying about boots and shoes, as if I had never borne his 
Majesty’s commission. He gave me no money, but he fed and 
lodged me comfortably. The men and boys used to laugh, and 
call me General, and Lord Cornwallis, and all sorts of nick- 
names ; and old Stiffelkind made a thousand new ones for me. 

One day I can recollect — one miserable day, as I was pol- 
ishing on the trees a pair of boots of Mr. Stiffelkind’s manufac- 
ture — the old gentleman came into the shop, with a lady on his 
arm. 

“ Vere is Gaptain Stobbs ? ” said he. “ Vere is dat orna- 
ment to his Majesty's service ? ” 

I came in from the back shop, where I was polishing the 
boots, with one of them in my hand. 

‘‘ Look, my dear,” says he, “ here is an old friend of yours, 
his Excellency Lort Cornvallis ! — Who would have thought 
such a nobleman vood turn shoeblack ? Captain Stobbs, here 
is your former flame, my dear niece, Miss Crutty. How could 
you, Magdalen, ever leaf such a lof of a man ? Shake hands 
vid her, Gaptain ; — dere, never mind de blacking ! ” But Miss 
drew back. 

I never shake hands with a shoeblack^^^ said she, mighty 
contemptuous. 

“ Bah ! my lof, his fingers von’t soil you. Don’t you know 
he has just been vitewashed 1 ” 

‘‘ I wish, uncle,” says she, ‘‘ you would not leave me with 
such low people.’’ 


112 


STORIES. 


“ Low, because he cleans boots ? De Oaptain prefers pumps 
to boots 1 tiiih — ha ! ha ! ” 

“ Captain indeed ! a nice Captain, ’’ says Miss Crutty, snap- 
ping her lingers in my face, and walking away : “ a Captain 
who has had his nose pulled ! ha ! ha ! ” — And how could J 
help it ? it wasn't by my own choice that that ruffian Mhaters 
took such liberties with me. Didn’t I show how averse 1 was 
to all quarrels by refusing altogether his challenge ? — But such 
is the worldc And thus the people at Stiffelkind’s used to 
tease me, until they drove me almost mad. 

At last he came home one day more merry and abusive than, 
ever. Captain,” says he, “ I have goot news for you — a goot 
place. Your lordship vill not be able to geep your garridge, 
but you vill be gomfortable, and serve his Majesty.” 

‘‘ Serve his Majesty } ” says I, “ Dearest Mr. Stiffelkind, 
have you got me a place under Government ? ” 

‘• Yes, and somting better still — not only a place, but a 
uniform : yes. Captain Stobbs, a red goaf 

A red coat ! I hope you don’t think I would demean my- 
self by entering the ranks of the army ? I am a gentleman, Mr. 

Stiffelkind — I can never — no, I never ” 

No, I know you will never — you are too great a goward — 
ha ! ha ! — though dis is a red goat, and a place where you must 
give some hard knocks too — ha ! ha ! — do you gomprehend t — 
and you shalkbe a general instead of a gaptain — ha ! ha ! ” 

“ A general in a red coat, Mr. Stiffelkind ? ” 

“ Yes, a General Bostman ! — ha ha ! 1 have been vid your 
old friend, Bunting, and he has an uncle in the Lost office, and 
he has got you de place — eighteen shillings a veek, you rogue, 
and your goat. You must not oben any of de letters you know.” 

And so it was — I, Robert Esquire, became the vile 

thin'’; lie named — a general pn Iman. ! 

' ' * * * 

I was so disgusted with Stiffelkind’s brutal jokes, which 
were now more brutal than ever, that when I got my place in 
the Post Office, I never went near the fellow again : for though 
he had done me a favor in keeping me from starvation, he cer- 
tainly had done it in a very rude, disagreeable manner, and 
showed a low and mean spirit in shoving \\\c^ into such a de- 
graded place as that of postman. But what had I to do ? I 
submitted to fate, and for th.rcc years or more, Robert Stubbs, 

of the North Bungay Fcncibles, v/as 

1 wonder nobody recognized me. 1 lived in daily fear the 
first year : but afterwards grew accustomed to my situation, as 


THE FATAL BOOTS. 


773 


all great men will do, and wore my red coat as naturally as if 
I had been sent into the world only for the purpose of being a 
letter-carrier. 

1 was first in the Whitechapel district, where I stayed for 
nearly three years, when I was transferred to Jermyn Street 
and Duke Street — famous places for lodgings. 1 suppose I 
left a hundred letters at a house in the latter street, where lived 
some people who must have recognized me ha,d they but once 
chanced to look at me. 

You see that, when I left Sloffemsquiggle, and set out in the 
gay world, my mamma had written to me a dozen times at least ; 
but I never answered her, for I knew she wanted money, and 1 
detest writing. Well, she stopped her letters, finding she could 
get none from me : — but when I was in the Fleet, as I told you, 
I wrote repeatedly to my dear mamma, and was not a little 
nettled at her refusing to notice me in my distress, which is the 
very time one most wants notice. 

Stubbs is not an uncommon name ; and though I saw Mrs. 
Stubbs on a little bright brass plate, in Duke Street, and de- 
livered so many letters to, the lodgers in her house, I never 
thought of asking who she was, or whether she was my relation, 
or not. 

One day the young woman who took in the letters had not 
got change, and she called her mistress. An old lady in a 
poke-bonnet came out of the parlor, and put on her spectacles, 
and looked at the letter, and fumbled in her pocket for eight- 
pence, and apologized to the postman for keeping him waiting. 
And when I said, Never mind. Ma'am, it’s no trouble,” the 
old lady gave a start, and then she pulled off her spectacles, 
and staggered back ; and then she began muttering, as if about 
to choke ; and then she gave a great screech, and flung herself 
into my arms, and roared out, “ My son, my son ! ” 

“ Law, mamma,” said I, is that you ? ” and I sat down on 
the hall bench with her, and let her kiss me as much as ever 
she liked. Hearing the whining and crying, down, comes 
another lady from up stairs, — it was my sister Eliza ; and down 
come the lodgers. And the maid gets water and what not, and 
I was the regular hero of the group. I could not stay long then, 
having my letters to deliver. But, in the ev^ening, after mail- 
time, T went back to my mamma and sister ; and, over a bottle 
of prime old port, and a precious good leg of boiled mutton and 
turnips, made myself pretty comfortable, I can tell you. 


774 


STORJES. 


DECEMBER.— “THE WINTER OF OUR DISCONTENT.” 

Mamma had kept the house in Duke Street for more than 
two years. I recollected some of the chairs and tables from 
dear old Sloffemsquiggle, and the bowl in which 1 had made 
that famous rum-punch, the evening she went away, which she 
and my sisters left untouched, and I was obliged to drink after 
they were gone ; but that’s not to the purpose. 

Think of my sister Lucy’s luck ! that chap. Waters, fell in 
lave with her, and married her ; and she now keeps her carriage, 
and lives in state near Sloffemsquiggle. I offered to make it 
up with Waters ; but he bears malice, and never will see or 
speak to me. — He had the impudence, too, to say, that he took 
in all letters for mamma at Sloffemsquiggle ; and that as mine 
were all begging-letters, he burned them, and never said a word 
to her concerning them. He allowed mamma fifty pounds a 
year, and, if sho were not such a fool, she might ha’/c liad three 
times as much ; but the old lady was high and mighty forsooth, 
and would not be beholden, even to her own daughter, for 
more than she actually wanted. Even this fifty pound she was 
going to refuse ; but when I came to live with her, of course I 
wanted pocket-money as well as board and lodging, and so I 
had the fifty pounds for 77iy share, and eked out with it as well 
as I could. 

Old Bates and the Captain, between them, gave mamma a 
hundred pounds when she left me (she had the deuce’s own 
luck, to be sure — much more than ever fell to 7nc^ I know) ; and 
as she said she luoidd try and work for her living, it was thought 
best to take a house and let lodgings, which she did. Our first 
and second floor paid us four guineas a week, on an average ; 
and the front parlor and attic made forty pounds more. Mamma 
and Eliza used to have the front attic: but / took that, and 
they slept in the servants’ bedroom. Lizzy had a pretty genius 
for work, and earned a guinea a week that way ; so that we had 
got nearly two hundred a year over the rent to keep house with, 
■ — and we got on pretty well. Besides, women eat nothing : 
my women didn’t care for meat for days together sometimes,--- 
so that it was only necessary to dress a good steak or so for 
me. 

Mamma would not think of my continuing in the Post Office. 
She said her dear Robert, her husband’s son, her gallant soldier, 


THE FATAL BOOTS. 


775 


and all that, should remain at home and be a gentleman— which 
1 was, certainly, though I didn’t find fifty pounds a year very 
much to buy clothes and be a gentleman upon. To be sure, 
mother found me shirts and linen, so that that wasn’t in the 
fifty pounds. She kicked a little at paying the washing too ; 
bnt she gave in at last, for I was her dear Bob, you know ; and 
Tm blest if I could not make her give me the gown off her 
back. Fancy ! once she cut up a very nice rich black silk 
scarf, which my sister Waters sent her, and made me a waist- 
coat and two stocks of it. She was so very soft, the old lady ! 
******* 

I’d lived in this way for five years or more, making myself 
content with my fifty pounds a year {perhaps I’d saved a little 
out of it : but that’s neither here nor there). From year’s end 
to year’s end I remained faithful to my dear mamma, never 
leaving her except for a month or so in the summer — when a 
bachelor may take a trip to Gravesend or Margate, which would 
be too expensive for a family. I say a bachelor, for the fact is, 
I don’t know whether I am married or not — never having heard 
a word since of the scoundrelly Mrs. Stubbs. 

I never went to the public-hous^ before meals : for, With my 
beggarly fifty pounds, I could not afford to dine away from 
home : but there I had my regular seat, and used to come home 
pretty glorious., I can tell you. Then bed till eleven ; then 
breakfast and the newspaper ; then a stroll in Hyde Park or 
St. James’s ; then home at half-past three to dinner — when I 
jollied, as I call it, for the rest of the day. I was iny mother’s 
delight ; and thus, with a clear conscience, I managed to live on. 
******* 

How fond she was of me, to be sure ! Being sociable my- 
self, and loving to have my friends about me, we often used to 
assemble a company of as hearty fellows as you would wish to 
sit down with, and keep the nights up royally. “ Never mind, 
my boys,” I used to say. Send the bottle round : mammy 
pays for all.” As she did, sure enough : and sure enough we 
punished her cellar too. The good old lady used to wait upon 
us, as if for all the world she had been my servant, instead of 
a lady and my mamma. Never used she to repine, though I 
often, as I must confess, gave her occasion (keeping her up till 
four o’clock in the morning, because she never could sleep 
until she saw her “ dear Bob ” in bed, and leading her a sad 
anxious life). She was of such a sweet temper, the old lady, 
that I think in the course of five years I never knew her in a 
passion, except twice: a;v:i the;! witli :>istcr Lizzy, who declared 


STORIES. 


776 

T was ruining the house, and driving the lodgers away, one by 
one. But mamma would not hear of such envious spite on my 
sister's part. Her Bob ” was always right, she said. At last 
Lizzy fairly retreated, and went to the Waters’s. — I was glad of. 
it, for her temper was dreadful, and we used to be squabbling 
from morning till night ! 

Ah, those were jolly times ! but Ma was obliged to give up 
the lodging-house at last — for, somehow, things went wrong 
after my sister’s departure — the nasty uncharitable people said, 
on account of me ; because I drove away the lodgers by smok- 
ing and drinking, and kicking up noises in the house ; and 
because Ma gave me so much of her money ; — so she did, buc 
if she would give it, you know, how could I help it ? Heigho ! 
I wish I’d kept it. 

No such luck. The business I thought was to last forever ; 
but at the end of two years came a smash — shut up shop — sell 
off everything. Mamma went to the Waters’s: and, will you 
believe it ? the ungrateful wretches would not receive me ! that 
Mary, you see, was.5*<7 disappointed at not mariidng me. Twenty 
pounds a year they allow, it is true ; but what’s that for a gentle- 
man 't For twenty years Lhave been struggling manfully to 
gain an honest livelihood, and, in the course of them, have 
seen a deal of life, to be sure. I’ve sold cigars and pocket- 
handkerchiefs at the corners of streets ; I’ve been a billiard- 
marker ; I’ve been a director (in the panic year) of the Imperial 
British Consolidated Mangle and Drying Ground Company. 
I’ve been on the stage (for two years as an actor, and about a 
month as a cad, when I was very low) ; I’ve been the means of 
giving to the police of this empire some very valuable informa- 
tion (about licensed victuallers, gentlemen’s carts, and pawn- 
brokers’ names) ; I’ve been very nearly an officer again — that 
is, an assistant to an officer of the Sheriff of Middlesex : it was 
my last place. 

On the last day of the year 1837, even game was up. 
It’s a thing that very seldom happened to a gentleman, to be 
kicked out of a sponging-house \ but such was my case. Young 
Nabb (who succeeded his father) drove me ignominiously from 
his door, because I had charged a gentleman in the coffee-rooms 
seven-and-sixpence for a glass of ale and bread-and-cheese, the 
charge of the house being only six shillings. He had the mean- 
ness to deduct the eighteenpence from my wages, and because 
I blustered a bit, he took me by the shoulders and turned me 
out — me, a gentleman, and, what is more, a poor orphan ! 

How I did rage and swear at him when I got out into ihe 


THE EA7AL BOOTS. 


Ill 


Street! 'There stood he, the hideous Jew monster, at the 
double door, writhing under the effect of my language. I had 
my revenge 1 Heads were thrust out of every bar of his window^ 
laughing ‘at him. A crowd gathered round me, as 1 stood 
pounding him with my satire, and they evidently enjoyed his 
discomfiture. I think the mob would have pelted the ruffian to 
death (one or two of their missiles hit rne^ I can tell you), when 
a policeman came up, and in reply to a gentleman, who was 
asking what was the disturbance, said, “ Bless you, sir, it’s 
Lord Cornwallis.’' “ Move on. Boots;' said the fellow to me ; 
for the fact is, my misfortunes and early life are pretty well 
known — and so the crowd dispersed. 

“What could have made that policeman call you Lord Corn- 
wallis and Boots ” said the gentleman, who seemed mightily 
amused, and had followed me. “ Sir,” sap I, “ I am an 
unfortunate officer of the North Bungay Fencibles, and I’ll tell 
you willingly for a pint of beer.” He told me to follow him to 
his chambers in the Temple, which I did (a five pair back), and 
there, sure enough, I had the beer ; and told him this very story 
you’ve been reading. You see he is what is called a literary 
man — and sold my adventures for me to the booksellers : he’s 

a strange chap ; and savs they’re moral. 

* * * 

I’m blest if /can see anything moral in them. I’m sure I 
ought to have been more lucky through life, being so very wide 
awake. And yet here I am, without a place, or even a friend, 
starving upon a beggarly twenty pounds a year — not a single 
sixpence more, upon my hono7\ 












LITTLE TRAVELS 


AND 


ROAD-SIDE SKETCHES. 



I 


f 






/ 


•• 

, . V 

. V . I 


i ■ r. 


LITTLE TRAVELS 


AND 

ROAD-SIDE SKETCHES. 


I. — FiU)M Richmond in Surrey to Brussels in Belgium. 

* * I QUITTED the “ Rose Cottage Hotel ” at Richmond, 

one of the comfortablest, quietest, cheapest, neatest little inas 
in England, and a thousand times preferable, in my opinion, to 
the “ Star and Garter,’’ whither if you go alone, a sneering 
waiter, with his hair curled, frightens you off the premises ; and 
where, if you are bold enough to brave the sneering waiter, you 
have to pay ten shillings for a bottle of claret ; and whence, if 
you look out of the window, you gaze on a view which is so 
rich that it seems to knock you down with its splendor — a view 
that has its hair curled like the swaggering waiter : I say, I 
quitted the Rose Cottage Hotel ” with deep regret, believing 
that I should see nothing so pleasant as its gardens, and its 
veal cutlets, and its dear little bowling-green, elsewhere. But 
the time comes when people must go out of town, and so I got 
on the top of the omnibus, and the carpet-bag was put inside. 

If 1 were a great prince and rode outside of coaches (as I 
should if I were a great prince), I would, whether I smoked 
or not, have a case of the best Havanas in my pocket — not 
for my own smoking, but to give them to the snobs on the 
coach, who smoke the vilest cheroots. They poison the air 
with the odor of their filthy weeds. A. man at all easy in his 
circumstances would spare himself much annoyance by taking 
the abo\'c simple precaution. 


-82 LITTLE TRAVELS AA'D KOAD^S/DE SKETCHES. 

A gentleman sitting behind me tapped me on the back and 
asked for a light. He was a footman, or rather valet. He 
had no livery, but the three friends who* accompanied him 
were tall men in pepper-and-salt undress jackets with a duke’s 
coronet on their buttons. 

After tapping me on the back, and when he had finished 
his cheroot, the gentleman produced another wind-instrument, 
which he called a kinopium,” a sort of trumpet, on which he 
showed a great inclination to play. He began puffing out of 
the “ kinopium ” a most abominable air, which he said was the 
“ Duke's March.” It was played by particular request of one 
of the pepper-and-salt gentry. 

The noise was so abominable that even the coachman 
objected (although my friend’s brother footmen were ravished 
with it), and said that it was not allowed to play toons on his ’bus. 

“ Very well, said the valet, “ we >'e only of the Duke of B 's 

cstablishnwit^ that’s all.” The coachman could not resist 
that appeal to his fashionable feelings. The valet was allowed 
to play his infernal kinopium, and the poor fellow {the coach- 
man), who had lived in some private families, was quite anxious 
to conciliate the footmen of the Duke of B.’s establishment, 
that’s all, and told several stories of his having been groom in 
Captain Hoskins’s family, 7iephew of Governor Hoskins ; which 
stories the footm.en received with great contempt. 

The footmen were like the rest of the fashionable world in 
this respect. I felt for my part that 1 respected them. They 
were in daily communication with a duke ! They were not the 
rose, but they had lived beside it. There is an odor in the 
luiglish aristocracy which intoxicates plebeians. 1 am sure 
that any commoner in England, though he would die rather 
than confess it, would have a respect for those great big hulking 
Duke’s footmen. 

The day before, her Grace the Duchess had passed us aloi:ie 
in a chariot-and-four with two outriders. What better mark of 
innate superiority could man want ? Here was a slim lady 
who required four — six horses to herself, and four servants 
(kinopium was, no doubt, one of the number) to guard her. 

We were sixteen inside and out, and had consequently an 
eighth of a horse apiece. 

A duchess = 6, a commoner ; that is to say, 

I duchess = 48 commoners. 

If I were a duchess of the present day, I would say to the 
duke my nolfie husband, ‘‘ My dearest grace, I think, when I 
travel alone i^^ my chariot from Hammersmith to London, I will 


/<^7C0A/ RicnMOND TO BRUSSELS, 783 

not care for the outriders. In these days, when there is so 
much poverty and so much disaffection in the country, we should 
not eclahousscy the ca 7 iaille with the sight of our preposterous 
prosperity.'^ 

liut this i very likely only plebeian envy, and I dare say, 
if I were a lovely duchess of the realm, I would ride in a coach 
and six, with a coronet on the top of my bonnet and a robe of 
velvet and ermine even in the dog-days. 

Alas ! these are the dog-days. Many dogs are abroad — 
snarling dogs, biting dogs^ envious dogs, mad dogs \ beware 
of exciting the fury of such with your flaming red velvet and 
dazzling ermine. It makes ragged Lazarus doubly hungry to 
see Dives feasting in cloth-of-gold ; and so if I were a beaute- 
ous duchess * * * Silence, vain man ! Can the Queen 

lierself make you a duchess ? Be content, then, nor gibe at thy 
betters of /‘the Duke of B 's establishment — that’s all.” 

, On board the “ Antwerperiy' off everywhere. 

We have bidden adieu to Billingsgate, we have passed the 
'^Fhames Tunnel ; it is one o’clock, and of course people are 
thinking of being hungry. What a merry place a steamer is on 
a calm sunny summer forenoon, and what an appetite every 
one seems to have! We are, I assure you, no less than 170 
noblemen and gentlemen together, pacing up and down under 
the awning, or lolling on the sofas in the cabin, and hardly 
have we passed Greenwich when the feeding begins. The com- 
pany was at the brandy and soda-water in an instant (there is 
a sort of legend that the beverage is a preservative against sea- 
sickness), and I admired the penetration of gentlemen who 
partook of the drirdv. In the first place, the steward will put so 
much brandy into the tumbler that it is fit to choke you ; and, 
secondly, the soda-water, being kept as near as possible to the 
boiler of the engine, is of a fine wholesome heat when pre- 
sented to the hot and thirsty traveller. Thus he is prevented 
from catching any sudden cold which might be dangerous to 
him. 

The forepart of the vessel is crowded to the full as much as 
the genteeler quarter. There are four carriages, each with 
jDiles of imperials and aristocratic gimcracks of travel, under the 
wheels of which those personages have to clamber who have a 
mind to look at the bowsprit, and perhaps to smoke a cigar at 
ease. The carriages overcome, you find yourself confronted by 
a huge penful of Durham oxen, l3dng on hay and surrounded 
by a barricade of oars. Fifteen of these horned monsters main- 


y 54 little travels ANJ) road-side sketciii s. 

tain an incessant mooing and bellowing. 'Beyond the 
come a heap of cotton-bags, beyond the cotton-bags more 
carriages, more pyramids of travelling trunks, aiid valets and 
couriers bustling and swearing round about them. And al- 
ready, and in various corners and niches, lying on coils of rope, 
black tar-cloths, ragged cloaks, or hay, you see a score of those 
dubious fore-cabin passengers, who are never shaved, who 
always look unhappy, and appear getting ready to be sick. 

At one, dinner begins in the after-cabin — boiled salmon, 
boiled beef, boiled mutton, boiled cabbage, boiled potatoes, and 
parboiled wine for any gentlemen who like it, and two roast- 
ducks between seventy. After this, knobs of cheese are handed 
round on a plate, and there is a talk of a tart somewhere at 
some end of the table. All this I saw^ peeping through a sort 
of meat-safe which ventilates the top of the cabin, and very 
happy and hot did the people seem below. 

“ How the deuce can people dine at such an hour ? ” say 
several genteel fellows who are watching the manccuvres. ‘‘ I 
can't touch a morsel before seven.'’ 

But somehow at half-past three o’clock we had dropped a 
long way down the river. The air was delightfully frpsh, the 
sky of a faultless cobalt, the river shining and flashing like 
quicksilver, and at this period steward runs against me bearing 
two great smoking dishes covered by two great glistening hemi- 
spheres of tin. “ Fellow,” says I, “what’s that.?” 

He lifted up the cover : it was ducks and green pease, by 
jingo ! 

“ What ! haven’t they done yd^ the greedy creatures ? ” [ 
asked. “ Have the people been feeding for three hours .? ” 

“ Law bless 3'ou, sir, it's the second dinner. Make haste, 
or you won’t get a place.” At which words a genteel party, 
with whom I had been conversing, instantly tumbled down the 
hatch wa}^, and I find myself one of the second relay of seveiity 
who are attacking the boiled salmon, boiled beef, boiled cab- 
bage, &c. As for the ducks, I certainl}'- had some pe::;:e, \ ery 
line yellow stiff pease, that ought to have been split before th.ey 
were boiled; but, with regard to the ducks, I saw the animals 
gobbled up before my eyes by an old widow lady and her party 
just as I was shrieking to the steward to bring a knife and fork 
to carve them. The fellow ! (I mean the widow lady’s whis- 
kered companion) — I saw him eat pease with the very knife' 
with which he had dissected the duck ! 

After dinner (as I need not tell the keen ob.ser\’er of human 
nature who peruses this) the human mind, if the body be in a 


/^VWA/ RIC/IMOND TO BRUSSELS. 785 

decent state, expands into gayety and benevolence, and the 
intellect longs to measure itself in friendly converse with the 
divers intelligences around it. We ascend upon deck, and after 
eyeing each other for a brief space and with a friendly modest 
hesitation, we begin anon to converse about the weather and 
other profound and delightful themes cf English discourse. Vv'e 
confide to each other our respective opinions of the ladies round 
about us. Look at that charming creature in a pink bonnet 
and a dress of the pattern of a Kilmarnock snuff-box : a stal- 
wart Irish gentleman in a green coat and bushy red whiskers is 
whispering something very agreeable into her car, as is the wont 
of gentlemen of his nation ; for her dark eyes kindle, her red 
lips open and give an opportunity to a dozen beautiful pearly 
teeth to display themselves, and glance brightly in the sun ; 
while round the teeth and the lips a number of lovely dimples 
make their appearance, and her whole countenance assumes a 
look of perfect health and happiness. See her companion 
in shot silk and a dove-colored parasol : in what a graceful 
Watteau-like attitude she reclines. The tall courier who has 
been bouncing about the deck in attendance upon these ladies 
(it is his first day of service, and he is eager to make a favor- 
able impression on them and the lady’s-maids too) has just 
brought them from the carriage a small paper of sweet cakes 
(nothing is prettier than to see a pretty woman eating sweet 
biscuits) and a bottle that evidently contains Malmsey Madeira. 
How daintily they sip it ; how happy they seem ; how that lucky 
rogue of an Irishman prattles away ! Yonder is a noble group 
incleed : an English gentleman and his family. Children, 
mother, grandmother, grown-up daughters, father, and domes- 
tics, twenty-two in all. They have a table to themselves on 
the deck, and the consumption of eatables among them is really 
endless. The nurses have been bustling to and fro, and bring- 
ing, first, slices of cake ; then dinner ; then tea with huge family 
jugs of milk ; and the little people have been playing hide-and- 
seek round the deck, coquetting with the other children, and 
making friends of every soul on board. I love to see the kind 
eyes of women fondly watching them as they gambol about ; a 
female face, be it ever so plain, when occupied in regarding 
children, becomes celestial almost, and a man can hardly fail 
to be good and happy while he is looking on at such sights. 

Ah, sir ! ” says a great big man, whom you would not accuse 
of sentiment, ‘‘ 1 have a couple of those little things at home ; ” 
and he stops and heaves a great big sigh and swallows down a 
lialf tumbler of cold something and water. We know what t-ie 


jSG LITTLR TRAVELS AXD ROAD-S/DK SKETCHES. 

honest fellow means well enough. He is saying to himself. 
“ God bless my girls and their mother ! ’’ but, being a Briton, 
is too manly to speak out in a more intelligible way. Perhaps 
it is as well for him to be quiet, and not chatter and gesticulate 
like those Frenchmen a few yards from him, who are chirping 
over a bottle of champagne. 

There is, as you may fancy, a number of such groups on 
the deck, and a pleasant occupation it is for a lonely man to 
watch them and build theories upon them, and examine those 
two personages seated cheek by jowl. One is an English youth, 
travelling for the first time, who has been hard at his Guide- 
book during the whole journey. He has a “ Manuel du ^''oy- 
ageur’' in his pocket : a very pretty, amusing little oblong work 
it is too, and might be very useful, if the foreign people in three 
languages, among whom you travel, would but give the answers 
set down in the book, or understand the questions you put to 
them out of it. The other honest gentleman in the fur cap, 
what can his occupation be 1 We know him at once for what 
he is. Sir,’’ says he, in a fine German accent, I am a bro- 
fessor of languages, and will gif you lessons in Danish, Swedish, 
English, Portuguese, Spanish and Persian.” Thus occupied in 
meditations, the rapid hours and the rapid steamer pass quickly 
on. The sun is sinking, and, as he drops, the ingenious lumi' 
nary sets the Thames on fire : several worthy gentlemen, watch 
in hand, are eagerly examining the phenomena attending his 
disappearance, — rich clouds of purple and gold, that form the 
curtains of his bed, — little barks that pass black across his 
disc, his disc every instant dropping nearer and nearer into the 
water. There he goes ! ” says one sagacious observer. “ No, 
he doesn’t,” cries another. Now he is gone, and the steward 
is already threading the deck, asking the passengers, right and 
left, if they will take a little supper. What a grand object is a 
sunset, and what a wonder is an appetite at sea ! Lo ! the 
horned moon shines pale over Margate, and the red beacon is 
gleaming from distant Ramsgate pier. 

* ^ 

A great rush is speedily made for the mattresses that lie in 
the boat at the ship’s sicle_; and as the night is delightfully 
calm, many fair ladies and worthy men determine to couch on 
deck for the night. The proceedings of the former, especially 
if they be young and pretty, the philosopher watches with in- 
describable emotion and interest. What a number of pretty 
coquetries do the ladies perform, and into what pretty attitudes 
do they take care to fall ! All the little children have been 


Richmond to Brussels. 787 

gathered up by the nursery-maids, and are taken down to roost 
below. Balmy sleep seals the eyes of many tired wayfarers, as 
you see in the case of the Russian nobleman asleep among the 
portmanteaus ; and Titmarsh, who has been walking the deck 
for some time with a great mattress on his shoulders, knowing 
full well that were he to relinquish it for an instant, some other 
person would seize on it, now stretches his bed upon the deck, 
wraps his cloak about his knees, draws his white cotton night- 
cap tight over his head and ears ; and, as the smoke of his 
cigar rises calmy upwards to the deep sky and the cheerful 
twinkling stars, he feels himself exquisitely happy, and thinks 
of thee, my Juliana! 

* ^ * * * * 

Why people, because they are in a steamboat, should get 
up so deucedly early I cannot understand. Gentlemen have 
been walking over my legs ever since three o’clock this morn- 
ing, and, no doubt, have been indulging in personalities (which 
I hate) regarding my appearance and manner of sleeping, lying, 
snoring. Let the wags laugh on ; but a far pleasanter occupa- 
tion is to sleep until breakfast time, or near it. 

The tea, and ham and eggs, which, with a beefsteak or 
two, and three or four rounds of toast, form the component 
parts of the above-named elegant meal, are taken in the River 
Scheldt. Little neat, plump-looking churches and villages are 
rising here and there among tufts of trees and pastures that 
are wonderfully green. To the right, as the “ Guide-book ” 
says, is Walcheren : and on the left Cadsand, memorable for 
the English expedition of 1809, when Lord Chatham, Sir 
Walter Manny, and Henry Earl of Derby, at the head of the 
English, gained a great victory over the Flemish mercenaries 
in the pay of Philippe of Valois. The cloth-yard shafts of 
the English archers did great execution. Flushing was taken, 
and Lord Chatham returned to England, where he distinguished 
himself greatly in the debates on the American war, which he 
called the brightest jewel of the British crown. You see, my 
love, that, though an artist by profession, my education has by 
no means been neglected ; and what, indeed, would be the 
pleasure of travel, unless these charming historical recollec- 
tions were brought to bear upon it ? 

Aniiverp. 

As many hundreds of thousands of English visit this city 
(I have met at least a hundred of them in this half-hour walk- 
ing the streets, ‘‘ Guide-book ” in hand), and as the ubiquitous 
Murray has already depicted the place, there is no need to 


y8o LITTLE TR AVETIS AND ROADS /EE SKETCTTES. 

enter into a long description of it, its neatness, its beauty, and 
its stiff antique splendor. The tall pale houses have many of 
them crimped gables, that look like Queen Pdizabeth’s ruffs. 
There are as many people in the streets as in London at three 
o’clock in the morning ; the market-women wear bonnets of a 
flower-pot shape, 'and have shining brazen milk-pots, which are 
delightful to the eyes of a painter. Along the quays of the 
lazy Scheldt are innumerable good-natured groups of beer- 
drinkers (small-beer is the most good-natured driiflc in the 
world) ; along the barriers outside of the town, and by the 
glistening canak, are more beer-shops and more beer drinkers. 
The city is defended by the queerest fat military. The cliief 
traffic is between the hotels and the railroad. The hotels give 
wonderful good dinners, and especially at the “Grand Labour- 
eur” may be mentioned a peculiar tart, which is the best of all 
tarts that ever a man ate since he was ten years old. A moon- 
light walk is delightful. At ten o’clock the whole city is quiet ; 
and so little changed does it seem to be, that you may walk 
back three hundred years into time, and fancy yourself a ma- 
jestical Spaniard, or an oppressed and patriotic Dutchman at 
your leisure. You enter the inn, and the old Quentin Durward 
courtyard, on which the old towers look down. There is- a 
sound of singing — singing at midnight. Is it Don Sopibrero, 
who is singing an Andalu.sian seguidilla under the window of 
the Flemish burgomaster’s daughter ? Ah, no ! it is a fat 
Flnglishman in a zephyr coat : he is drinking cold gin-and-water 
in the moonlight, and warbling softly — 

“ Nix my dolly, pals, fake away, 

N-ix my dolly, pals, fake a-r-a — way.” * 

I wish the good people would knock off the top part of 
Antwerp Cathedral Nothing can be more gracious and 

elegant than tlic line r‘- the first two compartments ; but near 
the top there bulges out a little round, ugly, vulgar Dutch 
monstrosity (fer which t! e architects have, no doubt, a name) 
which offends the eye erueily. Take the Apollo, and set upon 
him a bob-wig and a little cocked-hat; imagine “ God Save 
the King” ending with a jig ; fancy a polonaise, or procession 
of slim, stately, elegant court beauties, headed by a buffoon 
dancing a hornpipe. Marshal Gerard shoujd have discharged 
a bomb-shell at that abomination, and have given the noble 
steeple a chance to be finished in the grand style of the early 
fifteenth century, in w^hich it w'as begun, 

* In 1844. 


FKOj[ RICHMOND TO BRUSSELS. 


789 


This style of criticism is base and mean, and quite contrary 
to the orders of the immortal Goethe, wlio was only for allow- 
ing the eye to recognize the beauties of a great work, but would 
have its defects passed over. It is an unhappy, luckless or- 
ganization which will be perpetually fault-finding, and in the 
midst of a grand concert of music will persist only in hearing 
that unfortunate fiddle out of tun^ 

Within — except where the rococo architects have introduced 
their ornaments (here is the fiddle out of tune again) — the 
cathedral is noble. A rich, tender sunshine is streaming in 
through the windows, and gilding the stately^.edifice with the 
purest light. The admirable stained-glass windows are not too 
brilliant in their colors. The organ is playing a rich, solemn 
music ; some two hundred people are listening to the service ; 
and there is scarce, one of the women kneeling on her chair, 
enveloped in her full, majestic black drapery, that is not a fine 
study for a painter. These large black mantles of heavy silk 
brought over the heads of the women, and covering their persons, 
fall into such fine folds of drapery, that they cannot help being 
picturesque and noble. See, kneeling by the side of two of 
those fine devout-looking figures, is a lady in a little twiddling 
Parisian hat and feather, in a little lace mantelet, in a tight 
gown and a bustle. She is almost as monstrous as yonder fig- 
ure of the Virgin, in a hoop, and with a huge crown and a ball 
and a sceptre ; and a bambino dressed in a little hoop, and in 
a little crown, round which are clustered flowers and pots of 
orange-trees, and before which many of the faithful are at 
prayer. Gentle clouds of incense come wafting through the 
vast edifice ; and in the lulls of the music you hear the faint 
chant of the priest, and the silver tinkle of the bell. 

Six Englishmen, with the commissionaires, and the ‘‘ Tvfur- 
ray’s Guide-books ’’ in their hands, are looking at the ‘‘ De- 
scent from the Cross.” Of this picture the “ Guide-book ” 
gives you orders hov/ to judge. If it is the end of religious 
painting to express the religious sentiment, a hundred of infe- 
rior pictures must rank before the Rubens. Who was ever 
piously affected by any picture of the master ? He can depict 
a living thief writhing upon the cross, sometimes a blonde 
Magdalen weeping below it ; but it is a Magdalen a very short 
time indeed after her repentance : her yellow brocades and 
flaring satins are still those which she wore when she was in 
the world ; her body has not yet lost the marks of the feasting 
and voluptuousness in which she used to indulge, according to 


JJTTLF. TFAVELS AXD ROADSIDE RKETCHES. 

llie legend. Not one of the Rubens’ pictures among ali the 
scores that decorate chapels and churches here, has the lea: t 
tendency to purify, to touch the affections, or to awaken the 
feelings of religious respect and wonder. The “ Descent fr. tm 
the Cross ” is vast, gloomy, andl awful ; ]:)ut the awe inspired 
by it is, as I take it, altogether material. He might have 
painted a picture of any criminal broken on the wheel, and the 
sensation inspired by it would have been precisely similar. 
Nor in a religious picture do you want the savior-faire of the 
master to be always protruding itself ; it detracts from the feel- 
ing of reverence, just as the thumping of cushion and the spout- 
ing of tawdry oratory does from a sermon ; meek religion dis- 
appears, shouldered out of the desk by the pompous, stalwart, 
big-chested, fresh-colored, bushy-whiskered pulpiteer. Rubens’ 
piety has always struck us as of this sort. If he takes a pious 
subject, it is to show you in what a fine way he, Peter lhaul 
Rubens, can treat it. He never seems to doubt but that he is 
doing it a great honor. His Descent from the Cross ” and 
its accompanying wings and cover, are a set of puns upon the 
word Christopher, of which the taste is more odious than that of 
the hooped-petticoated Virgin yonder, with her artificial flowers, 
and her rings and brooches. The people who made an offer- 
ing of that hooped petticoat did their best, at any rate ; they 
knew no better. There is humility in that simple, quaint pres- 
ent ; trustfulness and kind intention. Looking about at other 
altars, you see (much to the horror of pious Protestants) all 
sorts of queer little emblems hanging up under little pyramids 
of penny candles that are sputtering and flaring there. Here 
you have a silver arm, or a little gold toe, or a wax leg, or a 
gjjt eye, signifying and commemorating cures that have been 
performed by the supposed intercession of the saint over whose 
chapel they hang. Well, although they are abominable super- 
stitions, yet these queer little offerings seem to me to be a 
great deal more pious than Rubens’ big pictures ; just as is the 
widow with her poor little mite compared to the swelling PharL 
see who flings his purse of gold into the plate. 

A couple of days of Rubens and his church pictures makes 
one thoroughly and entirely sick of him. His very genius and 
splendor palls upon one, even taking the pictures as worldly 
pictures. One grows weary of being perpetually feasted with 
this rich, coarse, steaming food. Considering them as church 
pictures, I don’t want to go to church to hear, however splen- 
did, an organ play the British Grenadiers.” 


FROM RlCIIMViYD TO BRUSSELS, 


791 

The Antvverpians have set up a clumsy bronze statue of 
their divinity in a square of the town ; and those who have not 
enough of Rubens in the churches may study him, and indeed 
to much greater advantage, in a good, well-lighted museum. 
Here, there is one picture, a dying saint taking the communion, 
a large piece ten or eleven feet high, and painted in an in- 
credibly short space of time, which is extremely curious indeed 
for the painter’s study. The picture is scarcely more than an 
immense magnificent sketch ; but it tells the secret of the 
artist’s manner, which, in the midst of its dash and splendor, is 
curiously methodical. Where the shadows are warm the lights 
are cold, and vice versa ; and the picture has been so rapidly 
painted, that the tints lie raw by the side of one another, the 
artist not having taken the trouble to blend them. 

There are two exquisite Vandykes (whatever Sir Joshua 
may say of them), and in which the very management of the 
gray tones which the President abuses forms the principal ex- 
cellence and charm. Why, after all, are we not to have our 
opinion ? Sir Joshua is not the Pope. The color of one of 
those Vandykes is as line as Ji7ie Paul Veronese, and the senti- 
ment beautifully tender and graceful. 

I saw, too, an exhibition of the modern Belgian artists 
(1843), remembrance of whose pictures after a month’s 
absence has almost entirely vanished. Wappers’ hand, as I 
thought, seemed to have grown old and feeble, Verboeck- 
hoven’s cattle-pieces are almost as good as Paul Potter’s, and 
Keyser has dwindled down into namby-pamby prettiness, piti- 
ful to see in the gallant young painter who astonished the 
Louvre artists ten years ago by a hand almost as dashing and 
ready as that of Rubens himself. There were besides many 
caricatures of the new German schools, which are in themselves 
caricatures of the masters before Raphael. 

An instance of honesty may be mentioned here with ap- 
plause. The writer lost a pocket-book containing a passport 
and a couple of modest ten-pound notes. The person who 
found the portfolio ingeniously put it into the box of the post- 
office, and it was faithfully restored to the owner ; but some- 
how the two ten-pound notes were absent. It was, however, a 
great comfort to get the passport, and the pocket-book, which 
must be worth about ninepence. 


Brussels, 

It was night when we arrived by the railroad from Antwerp 


ygo LITTLE TEATELiS AND ROADSIDE SKETCHES. 

at Brussels ; the route is very pretty and interesting, and the 
hat countries through which the road passes in the highest 
state of peaceful, smiling cultivation. The fields by the road- 
side are enclosed by hedges as in England, the harvest was in 
])art down, and an Phiglish country gentleman who was of our 
party pronounced the crops to be as fine as any he had ever 
seen. Of this matter a cockney cannot judge accurately, but 
any man can see with what extraordinary neatness and care all 
these little plots of ground are tilled, and admire the richne:'s 
and brilliancy of vegetation. Outside of the moat of Antwerp, 
and at every village by which we passed, it was pleasant to see 
the happy congregations of well-clad people that basked in the 
evening sunshine, and soberly smoked their pipes and drank 
their Flemish beer. Men who love this drink must, as I fancy, 
have something essentially peaceful in their composition, and 
must be more easily satisfied than folks on our side of the 
water. The excitement of Flemii^h beer is, indeed, not great. 
I have tried both the white beer and the brown ; they are both 
of the kind which schoolboys denominate ‘‘swipes,” very sour 
and thin to the taste, but served, to be sure, in quaint FlemisI; 
jugs that do not seem to have changed their form since the 
days of Rubens, and must please the lovers of antiquari:;;i 
knicknacks. Numbers of comfortable-looking women a:id 
children sat beside the head of the family upon the tavern- 
benches, and it was amusing to see one little fellow of eight 
years old smoking, with much gravity, his father’s cigar. How 
the worship of the sacred plant of tobacco has spread through 
all Europe ! I am sure that the persons who cry out against 
the use of it are guilty of superstition and unreason, and 
that it would be a proper and easy task for scientific persons to 
write an encomium upon the weed. In solitude it is the pleas- 
antest companion possible, and in company never de trap, 'To 
a student it suggests all. sorts of agreeable thoughts, it re- 
freshes the brain when weary, and every sedentary cigar-smoker 
will tell you how much good he has had from it, and how he 
lias been able to return to his labor, after a quarter of an hour’s 
mild interval of the delightful leaf of Havana. Drinking 
has gone from among us since smoking came in. It is a wicked 
error to say that smokers are drunkards ; drink they do, but of 
gentle diluents mostly, for fierce stimulants of wine or strong 
liquors are abhorrent to the real lover of the Indian weed. 
Ah ! my Juliana, join not in the vulgar cry that is raised against 
us. Cigars and cool drinks beget quiet conversations, good- 
humor, meditation ; not hot blood such as mounts into the 


FROM R/CHMOND TO BRUSSELS. 


793 


head of drinkers of apoplectic port or dangerous claret. In- 
deed I think so somewhat ; and many improvements of social 
life and converse must date with the introduction of the pipe. 

We were a dozen tobacco-consumers in, the wagon of the 
train that brought us from Antwerp ; nor did the women of the 
party (sensible women !) make a single objection to the fumiga- 
tion. But enough of this ; only let me add, in conclusion, that 
an excellent Israelitish gentleman, Mr. Hartog of Antwerp, 
supplies cigars for a penny apiece, such as are not to be pro- 
cured in London for four times the §um. 

Through smiling corn-fields, then, and by little woods from 
which rose here and there the quaint peaked towers of some 
old-fashioned chciteaux., our train went smoking along at thirty 
miles an hour. We caught a glimpse of Mechlin steeple, at 
first dark against the sunset, and afterwards bright as we came 
to the other side of it, and admired long glistening canals or 
moats that surrounded the queer old town, and were lighted 
up in that wonderful way which the sun only understands, and 
not even Mr. Turner, with all his vermilion and gamboge, can 
put down on canvas. The verdure was everywhere astonishing, 
and we fancied we saw many golden Ciq^ps as we passed by 
these quiet pastures. 

Steam-engines and their accompaniments, blazing forges, 
gaunt manufactories, with numberless windows and long black 
chimneys, of course take away from the romance of the place ; 
but, as we whirled into Brussels, even these engines had a fine 
appearance. Three or four of the snorting, galloping monsters 
had just finished their journey, and there was a quantity of 
flaming ashes lying under the brazen bellies of each that looked 
properly lurid and demoniacal. The men at the station came 
out with flaming torches — awful-looking fellows indeed ! Pres- 
ently the different baggage was handed out, and in the very 
worst vehicle I ever entered, and at the very slowest pace, we 
were borne to the Hotel de Suede,” from which house of 
entertainment this letter is written. 

We strolled into the town, but, though the night was exces- 
sively fine and it was not yet eleven o’clock, the streets of the 
little capital were deserted, and the handsome blazing cafes 
round about the theatres contained no inmates. Ah, what a 
pretty sight is the Parisian Boulevard on a night like this ! how 
many pleasant hours has one passed in watching the lights, 
and th^ hum, and the stir, and the laughter of those happy, 
idle people ! There was none of this gayety here ; nor was 
there a person to be found, except a skulking commissioner or 


^^4 little tea eels Ai\D roadside sketches. 

two (whose real name in French is that of a fish that is eaten 
with fennel-sauce), and who offered to conduct us to certain 
curiosities in the town. What must we English not have done, 
that in every town in Europe we are to be fixed upon by scoun- 
drels of this sort 3 and what a pretty reflection it is on cur 
country that such rascals find the means of living on us ! 

Early the next morning we walked through a number of 
streets in the place, and saw certain sights. The Park is very 
pretty, and all the buildings round about it have an air of neat- 
ness — almost of stateliness. The houses are tall, the streets 
spacious, and the roads extremely clean. In the Parkis a little 
theatre, a cafe somewhat ruinous, a little palace for the king of 
this little kingdom, some smart public buildings (with S. P. Q. 
B. emblazoned on them, at which pompous inscription one can- 
not help laughing), and other rows of houses somewhat resem- 
bling a little Rue de Rivoli. Whether from my own natural 
greatness and magnanimity, or from that handsome share of 
national conceit that every Englishman jDossesses, my impress- 
ions of this city are certainly anything but respectful. It has 
an absurd kind of Lilliput look with it. There are soldiers, 
just as in Paris, better dressed, and doing a vast deal of drum- 
ming and bustle ; and yet, somehow, far from being frightened 
at them, I feel inclined to laugh in their faces. There are 
little Ministers, who work at their little bureaux ; and to read 
the journals, how fierce they are ! A great thundering Thncs 
could hardly talk more big. One reads about the rascally 
Ministers, the miserable Opposition, the designs of tyrants, 
the eyes of Europe, &c., just as one would in real journals. 
The Monitenr of Ghent belabors the Lidependent of Brussels ; 
the Indepe7ident idiW^ foul of theZyc/x; and really it is difficult 
not to suppose sometimes that these worthy people are in 
earnest. And yet how happy were they sua si bona nbrint ! 
Think what a comfort it would be to belong to a little state 
like this ; not to abuse their privilege, but philosophically to 
use it. If I were a Belgian, I would not care one single fig 
about politics. I would not read thundering leading articles. 
I would not have an opinion. What’s the use of an opinion 
liere ? Happy fellows ! do not the French, the English, and 
the Prussians, spare them the trouble of thinking, and make all 
their opinions for them ? Think of living in a country free, 
easy, respectable, wealthy, and with the nuisance of talking 
])olitics removed from out of it. All this might the Belgians 
have, and a part do they enjoy, but not the best part ; no, 


FJ^OM RICHMOND TO BRUSSELS. 


795 


these people will be brawling and by the ears, and parties run 
as high here as at Stoke Pogis or little Pedlington. 

These sentiments were elicited by the reading of a paper at 
the cafe in the Park, where we sat under the trees for a while 
and sipped our copl lemonade. Numbers of statues decorate 
the place, the very worst I ever saw. These Cupids must have 
been erected in the time of the Dutch dynasty, as I judge from 
the immense posterior developments. Indeed the arts of the 
country are very low. The statues here, and the lions before 
the Prince of Orange’s j^alace, would disgrace almost the figure- 
head of a ship. 

Of course we paid our visit to this little lion of Brussels 
(the Prince’s palace, I mean). The architecture of the building 
is admirably simple and firm ; and you remark about it, and 
all other works here, a high finish in doors, wood-works, paint- 
ings, &c., that one does not see in France, where the buildings 
are often rather sketched than completed, and the artist seems 
to neglect the limbs, as it were, and extremities of his figures. 

The finish of this little place is exquisite. We went through 
some dozen of state-rooms, paddling along over the slippery 
floors of inlaid woods in great slippers, without which we must 
have come to the ground. How did his Royal Highness the 
Prince of Orange manage when he lived here, and her Imperial 
Highness the Princess, and their excellencies the chamberlains 
and the footmen ? They must have been on their tails many 
times a day, that’s certain, and must have cut queer figures. 

The ballroom is beautiful — all marble, and yet with a com- 
fortable, cheerful look ; the other apartments are not less 
agreeable, and the people looked with intense satisfaction at 
some great lapis-lazuli tables, which the guide informed us 
were worth four millions, more or less ; adding with a very 
knowing look, that they were tm feu plus cher que Bor, This 
speech has a tremendous effect on visitors, and when we met 
some of our steamboat companions in the Park or elsewhere 
• — in so small a place as this one falls in with them a dozen 
times a day — “ Have you seen the tables 1 ” was the general 
question. Prodigious tables are they, indeed ! Fancy a table, 
my dear — a table four feet wide — a table with legs. Ye heavens ! 
the mind can hardly picture to itself anything so beautiful and 
so tremendous ! 

There are some good pictures in the palace, too, but not so 
extraordinarily good as the guide-books and the guide would 
have us to think. The latter, like most men of his class, is an 
ignoramus, who showed us an Andrea del Sarto (copy or 


796 LITTLE TRAVELS AND RQ AD-SIDE SKETCHES. 

original), and called it a Correggio, and made other blunders 
of a like nature. As is the case in England, you are hurried 
through the rooms without being allowed time to look at the 
pictures, and, consequently to pronounce a satisfactory judgment 
on them. 

In the Museum more time was granted me, and I spent 
some hours with pleasure there. It is an absurd little gallery, 
absurdly imitating the Louvre, with just such compartments 
and pillars as you see in the noble Paris gallery ; only here 
the pillars and capitals are stucco and white in place of mar- 
ble and gold, and plaster-of-paris busts of great Belgians are 
placed between the pillars. An artist of the country has made 
a picture containing them, and you will be ashamed of your 
ignorance when you hear many of their names. Old Tilly of 
Magdeburg figures in one corner ; Rubens, the endless Rubens, 
stands in the midst. What a noble countenance it is, and 
what a manly, swaggering consciousness of power ! 

.The picture to see here is a portrait, by the great Peter 
Paul, of one of the governesses of the Netherlands. It is just 
the finest portrait that ever was seen. Only a half-length, but 
such a majesty, such a force, such a splendor, such a simplicity 
about it ! The woman is in a stiff black dress, with a ruff and 
a few pearls ; a yellow curtain is behind her — the simplest 
arrangement that can be conceived ; but this great man knew 
how to rise to his occasion ; and no better proof can be shown 
of what a fine gentleman he was than this his homage to the 
vice-Queen. A common bungler would have painted her in 
her best clothes, with crown and sceptre, just as our Queen 
has been painted by — but comparisons are odious. Here 
stands this majestic VN^oman in her every-day working-dress of 
black satin, lookmg your hat off^ as it were. Another portrait 
of the same personage hangs elsewhere in the gallery, and it is 
curious to observe the difference between the two, and see 
how a man of genius paints a portrait, and how a common 
limner executes it. 

Many more pictures are there here by Rubens, or rather 
from Rubens’ manufactory, — odious and vulgar most of them 
are ; fat Magdalens, coarse Saints, vulgar Virgins, with the 
scene-painter’s tricks far too evident upon the canvas. By the 
>side of one of the most astonishing color-pieces in the world, 
the “ Worshipping of the Magi,” is a famous picture of Paul 
Veronese that cannot be too much admired. As Rubens 
sought in the first picture to dazzle and astonish by gorgeous 
variety, Paul in this sbems to wish to get his effect by sinipli- 


FROM RICHMOND TO BRUSSELS. 


797 


city, and has produced the most noble harmony that can be 
conceived. Many more works are there that merit notice, — a 
singularly clever, brilliant, and odious Jordaens, for example; 
some curious costume-pieces ; one or two works by the Belgian 
Raphael, who was a very Belgian Raphael indeed ; and a long 
gallery of the very oldest school, that, doubtless, afford much 
pleasure to the amateurs of ancient art. I confess that I am 
inclined to believe in very little that existed before the time of 
Raphael. There is, for instance, the Prince of Orange’s pic- 
ture by Perugino, very pretty indeed, up to a certain point, but 
all the heads are repeated, all the drawing is bad and affected ; 
and this very badness and affectation is what the so-called 
Catholic school is always anxious to imitate. Nothing can be 
more juvenile or paltry than the works of the native Belgians 
here exhibited. Tin crowns are suspended over many of them, 
showing that the pictures are prize compositions : and pretty 
things, indeed, they are ! Plave you ever read an Oxford 
prize-poem ? Well, these pictures are worse even than the 
Oxford poems — an awful assertion to make. 

In the matter of eating, dear sir, which is the next subject 
of the fine arts, a subject that, after many hours’ walking, at- 
tracts a gentleman very much, let me attempt to recall the 
transactions of this very day at the table-dUibte, i, green pea- 
soup ; 2, boiled salmon ; 3, mussels ; 4, crimped skate ; 5, 
roast-meat; 6, patties; 7, melon; 8, carp, stewed with mush- 
rooms and onions; 9, roast-turkey; 10, cauliflower and butter; 
II, fillets of venison piques., with asafcetida sauce ; 12, stewed 
calf’s-ear; 13, roast-veal; 14, roast-lamb; 15, stewed cherries ; 
16, rice-pudding; 17, Gruyere cheese, and about twenty-four 
cakes of different kinds. Except 5, 13, and 14, I give you my 
word I ate of all written down here, with three rolls of bread 
and a score of potatoes. What is the meaning of it ? How is 
the stomach of man brought to desire and to receive all this 
quantity 1 Do not gastronomists complain of heaviness in Lon- 
don after eating a couple of mutton-chops ? Do not respect- 
able gentlemen fall asleep in their arm-chairs ? Are they fit 
for mental labor 'i Far from it. But look at the difference 
i.ere : after dinner here one is as light as a gossamer. One 
walks with pleasure, reads with pleasure, writes with pleasure 
— nay, there is the supper-bell going at ten o’clock, and plenty 
of eaters, too. Let lord mayors and aldermen look to it, this 
fact of the extraordinary increase of appetite in Belgium, and, 
instead of steaming to Blackwall, come a little further to Ant- 
werp. 


-^8 LITTLE TRAVELS AND ROADSIDE SKETCHES 

Of ancient architectures in the place, there is a fine old 
Port de Halle, which has a tall, gloomy, bastile look ; a most 
magnificent town-hall, that has been sketched a thousand of 
times, and opposite it, a building that I think would be the very 
model for a Conservative club-house in London. Oh ! how 
charming it would be to be a great painter, and give the charac- 
ter of the building, and the numberless groups round about it. 
'Fhe booths lighted up by the sun, the market-women in their 
gowns of brilliant hue, each group having a character and tell- 
ing its little story, the troops of men lolling in all sorts of ad- 
mirable attitudes of ease round the great lamp. Half a dozen 
light-blue dragoons are lounging about, and peeping over the 
artist as the drawing is made, and the sky is more bright and 
blue than one sees it in a hundred years in London. 

The priests of the country are a remarkably well-fed and 
respectable race, without that scowling, hang-dog look which 
one has remarked among reverend gentlemen in the neighbor- 
ing country of France. ‘ Their reverences wear buckles to their 
shoes, light-blue neck-cloths, and huge three-cornered hats in 
good condition. To-day, strolling by the cathedral, 1 heard 
the tinkling of a bell in the street, and beheld certain persons, 
male and female, suddenly plump down on their knees before 
a little procession that was passing. Two men in black held a 
tawdry red canopy, a priest walked beneath it holding the 
sacrament covered with a cloth, and before him marched a 
couple of little altar-boys in short white surplices, such as you 
see in Rubens, and holding lackered lamps. A small train of 
street-boys followed the procession, cap in hand, and the clergy- 
man finally entered a hospital for old women, near the church, 
the canopy and the lamp-bearers remaining without. 

It was a touching scene, and as 1 stayed to watch it, I could 
not but think of the poor old soul who was dying within, listen- 
ing to the last words of prayer, led by the hand of the priest to 
to. the brink of the black, fathomless grave. How bright the 
sun was shining without all the time, and how happy and care- 
less everything around us looked ! 

The Duke d’Arenberg has a picture-gallery worthy of his 
princely house. It does not contain great pieces, but tit-bits 
of pictures, such as suit an aristocratic epicure. For such per- 
sons a great huge canvas is too much, it is like sitting down 
alone to a roasted ox ; and they do wisely, I think, to patronize 
small, high-flavored, delicate morceaux^ such as the Duke has 
here. 


I^'KOPJ RICHMOND TO BRUSSELS, 


799 


Among them may be mentioned, with special praise, a 
niagnilicent small Rembrandt, a Paul Potter of exceeding 
minuteness and beauty, an Ostade, which reminds one of 
Wilkie’s early performances, and a Dusart quite as good as 
Ostade. There is a Berghem, much more un^ected than that 
artist’s works generally are ; and, what is more precious in the 
eyes of many ladies as an object of art, there is, in one of the 
grand saloons, some needlework done by the Duke’s own grand- 
mother, which is looked at with awe by those admitted to see 
the palace. 

The chief curiosity, if not the chief ornament of a very 
elegant library, filled with vases and bronzes, is a marble head, 
supposed to be the original head of the Laocoon. It is, un- 
questionably, a finer head than that which at present figures 
upon the shoulders of the famous statue. The expression of 
woe is more manly and intense ; in the group as we know it, 
the head of the principal figure has always seemed to me to be 
a grimace of grief, as are the two accompanying young gentle- 
men with their pretty attitudes, and’ their little silly, open- 
mouthed despondency. It has always had upon me the effect 
of a trick, that statue, and not of a piece of true art. It would 
look well in the vista of a garden ; it is not august enough for 
a temple, with all its jerks, and twirls, and polite convulsions. 
But who knows what susceptibilities such a confession may 
offend t Let us say no more about the Laocoon, nor its head, 
nor its tail. The Duke was offered its weight in gold, they 
say, for this head, and refused. It would be a shame to speak 
ill of such a treasure, but I have my opinion of the man who 
made the offer. 

In the matter of sculpture almost all the Brussels churches 
are decorated with the most laborious wooden pulpits, which 
may be worth their weight in gold, too, for what I know, in- 
cluding his reverence preaching inside. At St. Gudule the 
preacher mounts into no less a place than the garden of Eden, 
being supported by Adam and Eve, by Sin and Death, and 
numberless other animals ; he walks up to his desk by a rustic 
railing of flowers, fruits, and vegetables, with wooden peacocks, 
paroquets, monkeys biting apples, and many more of the birds 
and beasts of the field. In another church the clergyman 
speaks from out a hermitage ; in a third from a carved palm- 
tree, which supports a set of oak clouds that form the canopy 
of the pulpit, and are, indeed, not much heavier in appearance 
than so many huge sponges. A priest, however tall or stout, 
must be lost in the midst of all these queer gimcracks ; in 


8oo little travels AjVB jwads/de setetcj/es. 

order to be consistent, they ought to dress him up, too, in some 
odd fantastical suit. I can fancy the Cure of jMeudon preach* 
ing out of such a place, or the Rev. Sydney Smith, or that 
famous clergyman of the time of the League, who brought all 
Paris to laugh and listen to him. 

But let us not be too supercilious and ready to sneer. It is 
only bad taste. It may have been very true devotion which 
erected these strange edifices. 


^ II. — Ghent — Bruges. 

GHENT. (1840.) 

The Beguine College or Village is one of the most extraor- 
dinary sights that all Europe can show. On the confines of 
the town of Ghent you come upon an old-fashioned brick gate, 
that seems as if it were one of the city barriers ; but, on pass- 
ing it, one of the prettiest sights possible meets the eye : At 
the porter’s lodge you see an old lady, in black and a white 
hood, occupied over her book ; before you is a red church with 
a tall roof and fantastical Dutch pinnacles, and all around it 
rows upon rows of small houses, the queerest, neatest, nicest 
that ever were seen (a doll’s house is hardly smaller or prettier). 
Right and left, on each side of little alleys, these little man- 
sions rise; they have a courtlet before them in which some 
green plants or hollyhocks are growing ; and to each house is 
a gate that has mostly a picture or queer-carved ornament upon 
or about it, and bears the name, not of the Beguine who in- 
habits it, but of the saint to whom she may have devoted it— 
the house of St. Stephen, the house of St. Donatus, the Eng- 
lish or Angel Convent, and so on. Old ladies in black are 
pacing in the quiet alleys here and there, and drop the stranger 
a curtsey as he passes them and takes off his hat. Never were 
such patterns of neatness seen as these old ladies and their 
houses. I peeped into one or two of the chambers, of which 
the windows were open to the pleasant evening sun, and saw 
beds scrupulously plain, a quaint old chair or two, and little 
pictures of favorite saints decorating the spotless white walls. 
The old ladies kept up a quick, cheerful clatter, as they paused 
to gossip at the gates of their little domiciles ; and with a 


GHENT. 


8oi 


great deal of artifice, and lurking behind walls, and looking at 
the church as if I intended to design that, I managed to get a 
sketch of a couple of them. 

But what white paper can render the whiteness of their 
linen; what black ink can do justice to the lustre of their 
gowns and shoes ? Both of the ladies had a neat ankle and a 
tight stocking ; and I fancy that heaven is quite as well served 
in this costume as in the dress of a scowling, stockingless friar, 
whom I had seen passing just before. The look and dress of 
the man made me shudder. His great red feet were bound up 
in a shoe open at the toes, a kind of compromise for a sandal. 
I had just seen him and his brethren at the Dominican Church, 
where a mass of music was sung, and orange-trees, flags, and 
banners decked the aisles of the church. 

One begins to grow sick of these churches, and the hideous 
exhibitions of bodily agonies that are depicted on the sides of 
all the chapels. Into one wherein we went this morning was 
what they called a Calvary : a horrible ghastly image of a 
Christ in a tomb, the figure of the natural size, and of the 
livid color of death ; gaping red wounds on the body and round 
the brows : the whole piece enough to turn one sick, and fit 
only to brutalize the beholder of it. The Virgin is commonly 
represented with a dozen swords stuck in her heart ; bleeding 
throats of headless John Baptists are perpetually thrust before 
your eyes. At the Cathedral gate was a papier-mache church- 
ornament shop — most of the carvings and reliefs of the same 
dismal character : One, for instance, represented a heart with 
a great gash in it, and a double row of large blood-drops drib- 
bling from it ; nails and a knife were thrust into the heart ; 
round the whole was a crown of thorns. Such things are 
dreadful to think of. The same gloomy spirit which made a 
religion of them, and worked upon the people by the grossest 
of all means, terror, distracted the natural feelings of man to 
maintain its power — shut gentle women into lonely, pitiless 
convents — frightened poor peasants with tales of torment — 
taught that the end and labor of life was silence, wretchedness, 
and the scourge — murdered those by fire and prison who 
thought otherwise. How has the blind and furious bigotry of 
man perverted that which God gave us as our greatest boon, 
and bid us hate where God bade us love ! Thank heaven that 
monk has gone out of sight ! It is pleasant to look at the 
smiling, cheerful old Be'guine and think no more of yonder 
livid face. 


So2 LITTLE TRAVELS AND ROADSIDE SAETCNES. 


One of the many convents in this little religious city seems 
to be the specimen-house, which is shown to strangers, for all 
the guides conduct you hither, and I saw in a book kept for 
the purpose the names of innumerable Smiths and Joneses 
registered. 

A very kind, sweet-voiced, smiling nun (I wonder, do they 
always choose the most agreeable and best-humored sister of 
the house to show it to strangers ?) came tripping down the 
steps and across the flags of the little garden-court, and wel- 
comed us v/ith much courtesy into the neat little old-fashioned, 
red-bricked, gable-ended, shining-windowed Convent of the 
Angels. First she showed us a whitewashed parlor, decorated 
with a grim picture or two and some crucifixes and other relig- 
ious emblems, where, upon stiff old chairs, the sisters sit and 
work. Three or four of them were still there, pattering over 
their laces and bobbins ; but the chief part of the sisterhood 
were engaged in an apartment hard by, from which issued a 
certain odor which I must say resembled onions : it was in 
fact the kitchen of the establishment. 

Every Beguine cooks her own little dinner in her own little 
pipkin ; and there was half a score of them, sure enough, busy 
over their pots and crockery, cooking a repast which, when 
ready, was carried off to a neighboring room, the refector}^ 
where, at a ledge-table which is drawn out from under her 
own particular cupboard, each nun sits down and eats her 
meal in silence. More religious emblems ornamented the 
canxd cupboard doors, and within, everything was as neat 
as neat could be : shining pewter ewers and glasses, snug 
baskets of eggs and pats of butter, and little bowls with about 
a farthing’s-worth of green tea in them — for some great day of 
fete, doubtless. The old ladies sat round as we examined these 
things, each eating soberly at her ledge and never looking 
round. There was a bell ringing in the chapel hard by. 
“ Hark ! said our guide, ‘‘ that is one of the sisters dying, 
Will you come and see the cells ? ’’ 

The cells, it need not be said, are the snuggest little nests 
in the world, with serge-curtained beds and snowy linen, and 
saints and martyrs pinned against the wall. We may sit up 
till twelve o’clock, if we like,” said the nun ; “ but we have no 
fire and candle, and so what’s the use of sitting up ? When 
we have said our prayers we are glad enough to go to sleep.” 

I forget, although the good soul told us, how many times 
in the day, in public and in private, these devotions are made, 
but fancy that the morning service in the chapel takes place at 


GITENT. 


803 

too early an hour for most easy travellers. We did not fail to 
attend in the evening, wl^en likewise is a general muster of the 
seven hundred, minus the absent and sick, and the sight is not 
a little striking to a stranger. 

The chapel is a Very big whitewashed place of worship, 
supported by half a dozen columns on either side, over each of 
which stands the statue of an Apostle, with his emblem of 
martyrdom. Nobody was as yet at the distant altar, which was 
too far off to see very distinctly ; but I could perceive two 
statues over it, one of which (St. Lawrence, no doubt) was 
leaning upon a huge gilt gridiron that the sun lighted up in a 
blaze — a painful but not a romantic instrument of death. A 
couple of old ladies in white hoods were tugging and swaying 
about at two bell-ropes that came down in the middle of the 
church, and at least five hundred others i*n white veils were 
seated all round about us in mute contemplation until the ser- 
vice began, looking very solemn, and white, and ghastly, like 
an army of tombstones by moonlight. 

The service commenced as the clock finished striking seven : 
the organ pealed out, a very cracked and old one, and presently 
some weak old voice from the choir overhead quavered out a 
canticle ; which done, a thin old voice of a priest at the altar 
far off (and which had now become quite gloomy in the sunset) 
chanted feebly another part of the service ; then the nuns 
warbled once more overhead ; and it was curious to hear, in 
the intervals of the most lugubrious chants, how the organ 
went off with some extremely cheerful military or profane air. 
At one time was a march, at another a quick tune ; which ceas- 
ing, the old nuns ]:)egan again, and so sung until the service was 
ended. 

In the midst of it one of the white-veiled sisters approached 
us with a very mysterious air, and put down her white veil 
close to our ears and whispered. Were we doing anything 
wrong, I wondered } Were they come to that part of the ser- 
vice where heretics and infidels ought to quit the church ? 
What have you to ask, O sacred white-veiled maid ? 

All she said was, “ Deux centi^mes pour les suisses,’’ which 
sum was paid ; and presently the old ladies, rising from their 
chairs one by one, came in face of the altar, where they knelt 
down and said a short prayer : then, rising, unpinned their 
veils, and folded them up exactly in the same folds and fashion, 
and laid them square like napkins on their heads, and tucked 
up their long black outer dresses, and trudged off to their coiv 
vents. 


8o4 little tratels a.vd roadside sketches. 


'['he novices wear black veils, under one of which I saw a 
young, sad, handsome face ; it was the only thing in the estab- 
lishment that was the least romantic or gloomy : and, for the 
sake of any reader of a sentimental turn, let us hope that the 
poor soul has been crossed in love, and that over some soul- 
stirring tragedy that black curtain has fallen. 

Ghent has, I believe, been called a vulgar Venice. It con- 
tains dirty canals and old houses that must satisfy the most 
eager antiquary, though the buildings are not quite in so good 
preservation as others that may be seen in the Netherlands. 
The commercial bustle of the place seems considerable, and it 
contains more beer-shops than any city I ever saw. 

These beer-shops seem the only amusements of the inhab- 
itants, until, at least, the theatre shall be built, of which the 
elevation is now complete, a very handsome and extensive pile. 
There are beer-shops in the cellars of the houses, which are 
frequented, it is to be presumed, by the lower sort ; there are 
beer-shops at the barriers, where the citizens and their families 
repair ; and beer-shops in the town, glaring with gas, with long 
gauze blinds, however, to hide what I hear is a rather question- 
able reputation. 

Our inn, the “ Hotel of the Post,’’ a spacious and comfort- 
able residence, is on a little place planted round with trees, 
and tiiat seems to be the Palais Royal of the town. Tl'.ice 
clubs, which look from without to be very comfortable, orna- 
ment this square with their gas lamps. Here stands, too, the 
theatre that is to be ; there is a cafe, and on evenings a mili- 
tary band plays the very worst music I ever remember to have 
heard. I went out to-night to take a quiet walk upon this 
place, and the horrid brazen discord of these trumpeters set me 
lialf mad. 

I went to the cafe' for refuge, passing on the way a subter- 
raneous beer-shop, where men and women were drinking to the 
sweet music of a cracked barrel-organ. They take in a couple 
of French papers at this cafe, and the same number of Belgian 
journals. You may imagine how well the latter are informed, 
when you hear that the battle of Boulogne, fought by the im- 
mortal Louis Napoleon, was not known here until some gen- 
deman out of Norfolk brought the news from London, and un- 
til it had travelled to Paris, and from Paris to Brussels. For 
a whole hour I could not get a newspaper at the cafe. The 
horrible brass band in the meantime had quitted the place, and 
now, to amuse the Ghent citizens, a couple of little boys came 
to the cafe and set up a small concert : one played ill on the 


GHENT 


805 

guitar, but sang, very sweetly, plaintive French ballads ; the 
other was the comic singer ; he carried about with him a queer, 
long, damp-looking, mouldy white hat, with no brim. ‘ Ecoutez,’' 
said the waiter to me, ‘‘ il va faire TAnglais ; c’est trhs drole 1 
The little rogue mounted his immense brimless hat, and, thrust- 
ing his thumbs into the armholes of his waistcoat, began to 
/airc' r Anglais, with a song in which swearing was the principal 
joke. We all laughed at this, and indeed the little rascal seemed 
to have a good deal of humor. 

How they hate us, these foreigners, in Belgium as much as 
in France ! What lies they tell of us ; how gladly they would 
see us humiliated ! Honest folks at home over their port-wine 
say, Ay, ay, and very good reason they have too. National 
vanity, sir, wounded — we have beaten them so often.’’ My 
dear sir, there is not a greater error in the world than this. 
They hate you because you are stupid, hard to please, and in- 
tolerably insolent and air-giving. I walked with an English- 
man yesterday, .j asked the way to a street of which he 
pronounced the name very badly to a little Flemish boy : the 
Flemish boy did not answer ; and there was my Englishman 
quite in a rage, shrieking in the child’r ear as if he must 
answer. He seemed to think that it was the duty of “ the 
snob,” as he called him, to obey the gentleman. This is why 
we are hated — for pride. In our free country a tradesman, a 
lackey, or a waiter will submit to almost any given insult from 
a gentleman : in those benighted lands one man is as good as 
another ; and pray God it may soon be so with us ! Of all 
European people, which is the nation that has the most haugh- 
tiness, the strongest prejudices, the greatest reserve, the great- 
est dulness ? I say an Englishman of the genteel classes. An 
honest groom jokes and hobs-and-nobs and makes his way with 
the kitchen-maids, for there is good social nature in the man ; 
his master dare not unbend. Look at him, how he scowls at 
you on your entering an inn-room ; think how you scowl your- 
self to meet his scowl. To-day, as we were walking and star- 
ing about the place, a worthy old gentleman in a carriage, 
seeing a pair of strangers, took . off his hat and bowed very 
gravely with his old powdered head out of the window : I am 
sorry to say that our first impulse was to burst out laughing — 
it seemed so supremely ridiculous that a stranger should notice 
and welcome another. 

As for the notion that foreigners hate us because we have 
beaten them so often, my dear sir, this is the greatest error in 
the world : well-educated Frenchmen do not believe that we 


go6 LITTLE TRAVELS AND ROAD-S/DE SKETCH ES 

have beaten them. A man was once ready to call me out in 
Paris because 1 said that we had beaten the French in Spain ; 
and here before me is a French paper, with a London corre- 
spondent discoursing about Louis Bonaparte and his jackass 
expedition to Boulogne. “ He was received at Eglintoun, it is 
true,” says the correspondent, ‘‘ but what do you think was the 
reason ? Because the English nobility were anxious to revenge 
upon his person (with some coups de lance) the checks which the 
^ grand honiine^ his <imcle had inflicted 07i us in Spain fl 

This opinion is so general among the French, that they 
would laugh at you with scornful incredulity if you ventured to 
assert any other. Foy’s history of the Spanish War does not, 
unluckily, go far enough. I have read a French history which 
hardly mentions the war in Spain, and calls the battle of Sala- 
manca a French victory. You know how the other day, and 
in the teeth of all evidence, the French swore to their victory 
of Toulouse : and so it is with the rest ; and you may set it 
down as pretty certain, ist. That only a few people know the 
real state of things in France, as to the matter in dispute be- 
tween us ; 2 d, That those who do, keep the truth to them- 
selves, and so it is as if it had never been. 

These Belgians have caught up, and quite naturally, the 
French tone. We are perfide Albioji with them still. Here is 
the Ghent paper, which declares that it is beyond a doubt that 
Louis Napoleon was sent by the English and Lord Palmerston ; 
and though it states in another part of the journal (from Eng- 
lish authority) that the Prince had never seen Lord Palmer- 
ston, yet the lie will remain uppermost — the people and the 
editor will believe it to the end of time. * * * See to what 

a digression yonder little fellow in the tall hat has given rise ! 
Let us make his picture, and have done with him. 

I could not understand, in my walks about this place, 
which is certainly picturesque enough, and contains extraordi 
nary charms in the .shape of old gables, quaint spires, and 
broad shining canals — I could not at first comprehend why, for 
all this, the town was especiall}" disagreeable to me, *and have 
only just hit on the reason why. Sweetest Juliana, you will 
never guess it : it is simply this, that 1 have not seen a single 
decent-looking woman in the whole place ; they look all ugly, 
with coarse mouths, vulgar figures, mean mercantile faces ; 
a'v.l so the traveller 'walking among them finds the pleasure of 
ills walk excessively damped, and the impressions made upon 
him disagreeable. 


RUCKS. 


807 

In the Academy there are no pictures of merit ; but some- 
times a second-rate picture is as pleasing as the best, and one 
may pass an hour here very pleasantly. There is a room ap- 
propriated to Belgian artists, of which I never saw the like : 
they are, like all the rest of the things in this country, miser- 
able imitations of the French school — ^great rude Venuses, and 
Junos a la David, with the drawing left out. ' 


BRUGES. 

The change from vulgar Ghent, with its ugly women and 
coarse bustle, to this quiet, old, half-deserted, cleanly Bruges, 
was very pleasant. I have seen old men at Versailles, with 
shabby coats and pigtails, sunning themselves on the benches 
in the walls ; they had seen better days, to be sure, but they 
were gentlemen still : and so we found, this morning, old 
dowager Bruges basking in the pleasant August sun, and look- 
ing if not prosperous, at least cheerful and well-bred. It is the 
quaintest and prettiest of all the quaint and pretty towns I 
have seen. A painter might spend months here, and wander 
from church to church, and admire old towers and pinnacles, 
tall gables, bright canals, and pretty little patches of green 
garden and moss-grown wall, that reflect in the clear quiet 
water. Before the inn-window is a garden, from which in the 
early morning issues a most wonderful odor of stocks and wall- 
flowers ; next comes a road with trees of admirable green ; 
numbers of little children are playing in this road (the place is 
so clean that they may roll in it all day without soiling their 
pinafores), and on the other side of the trees are little old- 
fashioned, dumpy, whitewashed, red-tiled houses. A p’oorer 
landscape to draw never was known, nor a pleasanter to see — 
the children especially, who are inordinately fat and rosy. Let 
it be remembered, too, that here we are out of the country of 
ugly women : the expression of the face is almost uniformly 
gentle and pleasing, and the figures of the \vomen, wrapped in 
long black monklike cloaks and hoods, very picturesque. No 
wonder there are so many children : the ‘‘ Guide-book ” (omnis- 
cient Mr. Murray !) says there are fifteen thousand paupers in 
in the town, and we know how such multiply. How the deuce 
do their children look so fat and rosy ? By eating dirt-pies, 
I suppose. I saw a couple making a very nice savory one, 
and another employed in gravely sticking strips of stick be 
Iwixt the pebbles at the house door, and so making for her- 


8o8 LITTLE TRAVELS AND ROADSIDE SKETCHES. 


self a stately garden. The men and women don’t seems to 
have much more to do. There are a couple of tall chimneys 
at either suburb of the town, where no doubt manufactories are 
at work, but within the walls everybody seems decently idle. 

We have been, of course, abroad to visit the lions. The 
tower in the Grand Place is very fine, and the bricks of which 
it is built do not yield a whit in color to the best stone. The 
great building round this tower is very like the pictures of the 
Ducal Palace at Venice ; and there is a long market area, with 
columns down the middle, from which hung shreds of rather 
lean-looking meat, that would do wonders under the hands of 
Cattermole or Haghe. In the tower there is a chime of bells 
that keep ringing perpetually. They not only play tunes of 
themselves, and every quarter of an hour, but an individual 
performs selections from popular operas on them at certain 
periods of the morning, afternoon, and evening. I have heard 
to-day “ Suoni la Tromba,” ‘‘ Son Vergin Vezzosa,” from the 
Puritani,” and other airs, and very badly they were played 
too ; for such a great monster as a tower-bell cannot be expected 
to imitate Madame Grisi or even Signor Lablache. Other 
churches indulge in the same amusement, so that one may come 
here and live in melody all day or night, like the young woman 
in Moore’s ‘‘ Lalla Rookh.” 

In the matter of art, the chief attractions of Bruges are tlie 
pictures of Hemling, that are to be seen in the churches, the 
hospital, and the picture-gallery of the place. There are /no 
more pictures of Rubens to be seen, and, indeed, in the course 
of a fortnight, one has had quite enough of the great man and 
his magnificent, swaggering canvases. What a difference is 
here with simple Hemling and the extraordinary creations of 
his pencil ! The hospital is particularly rich in them ; an/l the 
legend there is that the painter, who had served Charles the 
Bold' ill his war against the Swiss, and his last battle and defeat, 
wandered back wounded and penniless to Bruges, ana here 
found cure and shelter. 

This hospital is a noble and c aa ious sight. The great hall 
is almost as it was in the twclith century ; it is spanned by 
Saxon arches, and lighted by a multiplicity of Gothic windows 
of all sizes ; it is very lofty, clean, and perfectly well veniilated ; 
a screen runs across the middle of the room, to divide trie male 
from the female patients, and we were taken to examnie each 
ward, when the poor people seemed happier than possibly they 
would have been in health and 'starvation without iti Great 
yellow blankets were on the iron beds, the linen wai scrupu- 


BRUCES. 


809 

lously clean, glittering pewter jugs and goblets stood by the 
side of each patient, and they v;ere provided with godly books 
(to judge from the binding), in which several were reading at 
leisure. Honest old comfortable nuns, in queer dresses of blue, 
black, white, and flannel, were bustling through the room, at- 
tending to the wants of the sick. I saw about a dozen of these 
kind women’s faces ; one was young — all were healthy and 
cheerful. One came with bare blue arms and a great pile of 
linen from an outhouse — such a grange as Cedric the S?xon 
might have given to a guest for the night. A couple were in a 
laboratory, a tall, bright, clean room, 500 years old at least. 
“We saw you were not very religious,” said one of the old 
ladies, with a red, wrinkled, good-humored face, “by your be- 
havior yesterday in chapel.” And yet we did not laugh and 
talk as we used at college, but were profoundly affected by the 
scene that we saw there. It was a fete day : a Mass of Mozart 
W£s sung in the evening — not well sung, and yet so exquisitely 
lender and melodious, that it brought tears into our eyes. 
There were not above twenty people in the church : -all, save 
three or four, were women in long black cloaks. I took them 
for nuns at first. They were, however, the common people of 
tile town, very poor indeed, doubtless, for the priest’s box that 
w^ brought round was not added to by most of them, and 
thdr contributions were but two-cent pieces, — five of these go 
to i penny ; but we know the value of such, and can tell the 
exact worth of a poor woman’s mite ! The box-bearer did not 
seen at first willing to accept our donation — we were strangers 
and heretics ; however, I held out my hand, and he came per- 
force as it were. Indeed it had only a franc in it : but quc 
voidewoics ? I had been drinking a bottle of Rhine wine that 
day, aid how was I to afford more ? The Rhine wine is dear 
in this country, and costs four francs a bottle. 

Wdl, the service proceeded. Twenty poor women, two 
Englislmen, four ragged beggars, cowering on the steps ; and 
there was the priest at the altar, in a great robe of gold and 
damask two little boys in white surplices serving him, holding 
his robe as he rose and bowed, and the money-gatherer swing- 
ing his senscr, and filling the little chapel with smoke. The 
music pealed with wonderful sweetness ; you could see the prim 
white hads of the nuns in their gallery. The evening light 
streamed down upon old statues of saints and carved brown 
stalls, anl lighted up the head of the golden-haired Magdalen 
in a pictue of the entombment of Christ. Over , the gallery, 
and, as it were, a kind protectress to the poor below, stood the 
statue of he Virgin. 


8io LITTLE TRA VELS AND ROAD-SIDE SKETCHES 


III . — Waterloo. 

It is, my dear, the happy privilege of your sex in England 
to quit the dinner-table after the wine-bottles have once or 
twice gone round it, and you are thereby saved (though, to be 
sure, I can’t tell what the ladies do up stairs) you are saved two 
or three hours’ excessive duiness, which the men are obliged to 
go through. 

I ask any gentleman who reads this — the letters to my 
Juliana being written with an eye to publication — to remember 
especially how many times, how many hundred times, hav 
many thousand times, in his hearing, the battle of Waterloo lus 
been discussed after dinner, and to call to mind how cruelly fie 
has been bored by the discussion. Ah, it \vas lucky for us that 
the Prussians came up ! ” “ Hang the Prussians !” (or, perhaps, 
something stronger than “the Prussians!”) says a stout old 
major on half-pay. “We beat the French without them, sir, aj 
beaten them we always have 1 We were thundering down the lii,l 
of Belle Alliance, sir, at the backs of them, and the French we/e 
crying ‘ Sauve qui peut ’ long before the Prussians ever touched 
them 1 ” And so the battle opens, and for many mortal hoists, 
amid rounds of claret, rages over and over again. 

I thought to myself, considering the above things, wh^t a 
fine thing it wall be in after-days to say that I have beet to 
Brussels and never seen the field of Waterloo ; indeed, tiat I 
am such a philosopher as not to care a fig about the ba('le — 
nay, to regret, rather, that wdien Napoleon came back, th^Brit* 
ish Government had not spared their men and left him /lone. 

But this pitch of philosophy was unattainable. This/norn- 
ing, after having seen the Park, the fashionable boulevap, the 
pictures, the cafes — having sipped, I say, the sweets o| every 
flower that grow's in this paradise of Brussels, quite w/ary of 
the place, we mounted on a Namur diligence, and jinAed off 
at four miles an hour for Waterloo. I 

The road is very neat and agreeable : the Forest f Soig- 
nies here and there interposes pleasantly, to give you/vehicle 
a shade ; the country, as usual, is vastly fertile and wll culti- 
vated. A farmer and the conducteur w^ere my compaiions in 
the imperial, and, could I have understood their conprsation, 
my dear, you should have had certainly a report of lit. The 
jargon whicl; they talked was, indeed, most queer anopuzzling 


lVATE/y!LOO. 


8ii 

— French, 1 believe, strangly hashed up and pronounced, for here 
and there one could catch a few words of it. Now and anon, 
however, they condescended to speak in the purest French they 
could muster ; and, indeed, nothing is more curious than to 
hear the French of the country. You can’t understand why all 
the people insist upon speaking it so badly. I asked the con- 
ductor if he had been at the battle ; he burst out laughing like 
a philosopher, as he was, and said, ‘‘ Pas si bete.” I asked 
the farmer whether his contributions were lighter now than in 
King William’s time, and lighter than those in the time of the 
Emperor ? He vowed that in war-time he had not more to pay 
than in time of peace (and this strange fact is vouched for by 
every person of every nation), and being asked wherefore the 
King of Holland had been ousted from his throne, replied at 
once, ‘‘ Parceque c’etoit un voleur : ” for which accusation I 
believe there is some show of reason, his Majesty having laid 
hands on much Belgian property before the lamented outbreak 
which cost him his crown. A vast deal of laughing and roar- 
ing passed between these two worldly people and the postilion, 
whom they called “baron,” and I thought no doubt this talk 
was one of the many jokes that my companions were in the 
habit of making. But not so : the postilion was an actual baron, 
the bearer of an ancient name, the descendant of gallant gentle- 
men. Good heavens ! what would Mrs. Trollope say to see 
his lordship here His father the old baron had dissipated the 
family fortune, and here was this young nobleman, at about 
five-and-forty, compelled to bestride a clattering Flemish stal- 
lion, and bump over dusty pavements at the rate of five miles 
an hour. But see the beauty of high blood : with a calm grace 
the man of family accommodates himself to fortune. Far from 
being cast down, his lordship met his fate like a man : he 
swore and laughed the whole of the journe}^ and as we changed 
horses, condescended to partake of half a pint of Louvain beer, 
to which the farmer treated him— indeed the worthy rustic 
treated me to a glass too. 

Much delight and instruction have I had in the course of 
the journey from my guide, philosopher, and friend, the author 
of “ Murray’s Handbook.” He has gathered together, indeed, 
a store of information, and must, to make his single volume; 
have gutted many hundreds of guide-books. How the Con- 
tinental ciceroni must hate him, whoever he is ! Every English 
party I saw had this infallible red book in their hands, and 
gained a vast deal of historical and general information from it. 
Thus I heard, in confidence, many remarkable anecdotes of 


8i2 little travels ajvd eoad-slde sa^etciles. 


Charles Y., the Duke of Alva, Count Eginont, all of which I 
had before perceived, with much satisfaction, not only in the 
“ Handbook,'' but even in other works. 

The Laureate is among the English poets evidently the 
great favorite of our guide : the choice does honor to his head 
and heart. A man must have a very strong bent for poetry, 
indeed, who carries Southey's works in his portmanteau, and 
quotes them in proper time and occasion. Of course at Water- 
loo a spirit like our guide’s cannot fail to be deeply moved, and 
to turn to his favorite poet for sympathy. Hark how the 
laureated bard sings about the tombstones at Waterloo : — 

That temple to our hearts was hallow’d now, 

For many a wounded Briton there was laid, 

With such for help as time might then allow, 

From the fresh carnage of the field conveyed. 

And they whom human succor could not save. 

Here, in his precincts, found a hasty grave. 

And here, on marble tablets, set on high, 

In English lines by foreign workmen traced. 

The names familiar to an Englisli eye, 

Their brethren here the fit memorial placed ; 

Whose unadorned inscriptions briefly tell 

Their g-allafti comrades' rank, and where they felL 
The stateliest monument of human pride. 

Enriched with all magnificence of art. 

To honor chieftains who in victory died, 

Would wake no stronger feeling in the heart 
Than these plain tablets by the soldier’s hand 
Raised to his comrades in a foreign land.” 


There are lines for you ! wonderful for justice, rich in thought 
and novel ideas. The passage concerning their gallant com- 
rades' rank should be specially remarked. There indeed they 
lie, sure enough : the Honorable Colonel This of the Guards, 
Captain That of the Hussars, Major So-and-So of the l^ragoons, 
brave men and good, who did their duty by their country on 
that day, and died in the performance of it. 

Amen. But I confess fairly, that in looking at these tab- 
lets, I felt very much disappointed at not seeing the names of 
the men as well as the officers. Are they to be counted for 
nought? A few more inches of marble to each monument 
would have given s]3ace for all the names of the men ; and th.e 
men of that day were the winners of the battle, ^^'e have a 
right to be as grateful individually to any given private as lo 
any given officer ; their duties were very much the same. Why 
should the country reserve its gratitude for the genteel occu- 
piers of the army-list, and forget the gallant fellows whose 
humble names were written in the regimental books ? In read- 
ing of the Wellington wars, and the conduct of the men en- 
gaged in them, I don't know whether to respect them or to 


IVATEKLOO, 


S13 

wonder at them most. They have death, wounds, and poverty 
in contemplation ; in possession, poverty, hard labor, hard fare, 
and small thanks. If they do wrong, they are handed over to 
the inevitable provost-marshal ; if they are heroes, heroes they 
may be, but they remain privates still, handling the old brown 
bess, starving on the old twopence a day. They grow gray in 
battle and victory, and after thirty years of bloody service, a 
young gentleman of fifteen, fresh from a preparatory school, 
who can scarcely read, and came but yesterday with a pinafore 
into papa’s dessert — such a young gentleman, I say, arrives in 
a spick-and-span red coat, and calmly takes the command over 
our veteran, who obeys him as if God and nature had ordained 
that so throughout time it should be. 

That privates should obey, and that they should be smartly 
punished if they disobey, this^ one can understand very well. 
But to say obey forever and ever — to say that private John 
Styles is, by some physical disproportion, hopelessly inferior 
to Cornet Snooks — to say that Snooks shall have honors, 
epaulets, and a marble tablet if he dies, and that Styles shall 
fight his fight, and have his twopence a day, and when shot 
down shall be shovelled into a hole with other Styleses, and so 
forgotten ; and to think that we had in the course of the last 
war some 400,000 of these Styleses, and some 10,000, say, of 
the Snooks sort — Styles being by nature exactly as honest, 
clever, and brave as Snooks — and to think that the 400,000 
should bear this is the wonder ! 

Suppose Snooks makes a speech. “Look at these French- 
men, British soldiers,” says he, “ and remember who they are. 
Two-and-twenty years since they hurled their King from his 
throne, and murdered him ” (groans). “They flung out of their 
country their ancient and famous nobility — they published the 
audacious doctrine of equality — they made a cadet of artillery, 
a beggarly lawyer’s son, into an Emperor, and took ignoramuses 
from the ranks — drummers and privates, by Jove ! — of whom 
they made kings, generals, and marshals ! Is this to be borne ?” 
(Cries of “ No ! no ! ”) “ Upon them, my boys ! down with 

these godless revolutionists, and rally round the British lion ! ” 

So saying. Ensign Snooks (whose flag, which he can’t carry, 
is held by a huge grizzly color-sergeant,) draws a little sword, 
and pipes out a feeble huzza. The men of his company, roar- 
ing curses at the Frenchmen, prepare to receive and repel a 
thundering charge of French cuirassiers. The men fight, and 
Snooks is knighted because the men fought so well. 

But live or die, win or lose, what do they get ? English 


8 i 4 little travels AND ROAD-SIDE SKETCHES. 

glory is too genteel to meddle with those humble fellows. She 
does not condescend to ask the names of the poor devils whom 
she kills in her service. Why was not every private man’s 
name written upon the stones in Waterloo Church as well as 
every officer’s ? Five hundred pounds to the stone-cutters 
would have served to carve the whole catalogue, and paid the 
poor compliment of recognition to men who died in doing their 
duty. If the officers deserved a stone, the men did.- But come, 
let us away and drop a tear over the Marquis of Anglesea’s 
leg ! 

As for Waterloo, has it not been talked of enough after 
dinner } Here are some oats that were plucked before Hou- 
goumont, where grow not only oats, but flourishing crops of 
grape-shot, bayonets, and legion-of-honor crosses, in amazing 
profusion. 

Well, though I made a vow not to talk about Waterloo 
either here or after dinner, there is one little secret admission 
that one must make after seeing it. Let an Englishman go 
and see that field, and he never fo7'gets it. The sight is an 
event in his life ; and, though it has been seen by millions of 
peaceable gents — grocers from Bond Street, meek attorneys 
from Chancery Lane, and timid tailors from Piccadilly — I will 
wager that there is not one of them but feels a glow as he looks 
at the place, and remembers that he, too, is an Englishman. 

It is a wrong, egotistical, savage, unchristian feeling, and 
that’s the truth of it. A man of peace has no right to be daz- 
zled by that red-coated glory, and to intoxicate his vanity with 
those remembrances of carnage and triumph. The same sen- 
tence which tells us that on earth there ought to be peace and 
good-will amongst men, tells us to whom glory belongs. 


THE END, 


ENOCH MOHGAN^S SON? 




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113. More Words About tbe Bible, 

by Rev. Jas. S. Bush 20 

114. lo isieurLecoq, Gaboriau Pt. I . . 20 

Monsieur Lecoq, Pt. 11 20 

115. An Outline of Irish History, by 

Justin II. McCarthy 10 

116. TheLeroiige Cas^ by Gaboriau . 20 

117. Paul Clifford, by Lord Lytton. . .20 

118. A New Lease of Life, by About. .20 

119. Bourbon Lilies 20 

120. Other People's Money, Gaboriau 20 

121. The Lady of Lyons, Lytton... 10 

122. Ameline de Boiirg ; . . 15 

128. A Sea Queen, by W. Russell — 20 
124. The Ladies Lindores, by Mrs. 

Olinhant 20 

12.5. Haunted Hearts, by Simpson. ...10 
120. Loys, I ord Beresford, by The 

Duchess 20 

127. Under Two Flags, Ouida, Pt. I.. 15 

Under Two Flags, Pt. II 15 

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180. India, by Max MUller 20 

PH. Jets and Flashes 20 

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The Dug es.*: 10 

133. Mr Scarborough’s Family, by 

Antiiony Trollope, Parti 15 

Mr. Scarborough's Family, PtII 15 

134. Arden, by A. Mary F. Robin8on.l5 

1.85. The Tower of Percemoiit 20 

136. Yolande, by Wm. Black 20 

187. Cruel London by Joseph Hatton. 20 

138. The Gilded Clique, by Gaboriau. 20 

139. Pike County Folks, E. H. Mott. .20 

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142. Strange Adventures of a Phae- 

ton, by Wm. Black 20 

143. Denis Duval, by Thackeray 10 

144. Old Curiosity Shop,Dicken8,PtI.15 
Old Curiosity Shop, Part II. .. .15 

145. Ivanhoe, by Scott, Par'll 15 

Ivanhoe, by Scott, Part It 15 

M6. White Wings, by Wm. Black. .20 

147. The Sketch Book, by Irving 20 

148. Catherine, by W. M. Thackeray. 10 

149. Janet’s Repentance, by Eliot 10 

150. Barnaby Rudge, Dickens, Pt I. . 15 

Barnahy Rudge, Part II 15 

151. Felix Holt, by George Eliot 20 

152. Richelieu, by Lord Lytton 10 

153. Sunrise, by Wm. Black, Parti. .15 
Sunrise, by Wm. Black, Part 11.15 

154. Tour of the World in 80 Days.. 20 

155. Mystery of Orfcival, Gaboriau 20 


156. Lovel, the Widower, by W. M. 

Thackeray 10 

157. Romantic Adventures of a Milk- 

maid, by Thomas Hardy 10 

153. David Copperfield, Dickens, Pt 1.20 

David Copiierfield, PartTI 20 

160. liienzi, by Lord Lytton, Part I. . 15 


Rienzi, by Lord Lytton, Part 11.15 

161. Promise of Marriage, Gaboriau.. 10 

162. Faitli and UnfaitlC by Tha 

^ Duchess.,..,.,,,,,,,.,,.,,, ,,.,20 


163 . 

104. 

165. 

166 

167. 

168. 

160, 

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192 . 

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194. 

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196. 

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198. 

199. 


200 . 

201 . 


202 . 

‘^ 03 . 

204. 

205. 

206. 

207 . 

208. 


The Happy Man, by Lover... 16 
Barry Lyndon, by Thackeray — 20 

Eyre’s Acquittal 10 

Twenty Tliousand Leagues Un- 
der the Sea, tw J ules Verne — SO 
Anti-Slavery Days, by Jamea 

Freeman Clarke 80 

Beauty’s Daughters, by The 

Duchess 20 

Bevoiid the Sunrise 20 

Hard Times, by Charles Dickeng.20 
Tom Cringle s Log, by M. Scott.. 20 
Vanity Fair, Yy M.Thackeray.20 
Underground Russia, Stepniak..20 
Middlemarch, by Elliot, Pt I.... 20 

Middlemarch, Part II . . 20 

SirTom, by Mrs. Oliphant 20 

Pelham, by Lord Lytton 20 

The Story of Ida 10 

Madcap Violet, by Wm. Black.. 20 

The Little Pilgrim 10 

Kilmeuy, by Wm. Black 20 

Whist, or Bumblepuppy? 10 

The Beautiful Wretch, Black. ...20 
Her Mother’s Sin, by B. M. Clay.20 
Green Pastures and Piccadilly, 

by Wm. Black 20 

The Mysterious Island, by Jules { 

Verne, Part 1 15 

The Mysterious Island, Part II. .15 
The Mysterious Island, Part III.15 
Tom Brown at Oxford, Part I. . .15 
Tom Brown at Oxford, Part II. .15 
Thicker than Water, by J. Payn.2 ) 
In Silk Attire, by Wm. Black. . .20 
Scottish Cliiefs.Jane Porter, Pt.I.20 

Scottish Chiefs, Part II 20 

Willy Reillyjhy Will Carleton..20 
The Nautz Family, by Shelley.20 
Great Expectations, by Dicken8.20 
Peiidennis,by Thackeray, Part 1.20 
Pendeimi3,by Thackeray, Part 11.20 

Widow Bedott Papers. 20 

Daniel Deronda,Geo. Eliot, Pi. 1.20 

Daniel Deronda, Part II 20 

AltioraPeto, by Oliphant 20 

By the Gate of the Sea, by David 

Christie Murray 15 

Tales of a Traveller, by Irving. . .20 
Life and Voyages of Columbus, 
by VV'ashingtonlrvihg, Part I.. 20 
Life and Voyages of Columbus, 
by Washington Irving, Part 11.20 

The Pilgrim’s Progrei* 20 

Martin Chuzzlewit, by Charles 

Dickens, Part 1 20 

Martin Chuzzlewit, Part II 20 

Theophrastus Such, Geo. Eliot. . .20 
Disarmed, M. Betham-Edwirds..l5 
Eugene Aram, by Lord Lytton. 20 
The Spanish Gypsy and Other 

Poems, by George Eliot 20 

Cast Up by the Sea, Baker 20 

Mill on the Floss, Eliot, Pt. I. ..15 

Mill on the Floss, Part II 15 

Brother Jacob, and Mr. Gilfil’i f 
Love Story, by George Eliot. , .10 
Wreekg In the Sea of Lif ^ JO 


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